Spanish NewsBites: Teachable, Catchy Current Events

I love this website! Produced by a couple of teachers in Madrid, Spanish NewsBites is a blog of current events and topics designed for self-study and perfectly applicable to classroom use.

It can be hard to find authentic, current news stories that are a) interesting and b) graded, and the stories here are both. Plus they are really well-selected, truly covering "hot topics" in the Spanish-speaking world (Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize, a new film about the Spanish Civil War, Ferrán Adriá's food experimentation, etc.).

The articles/blog posts are organized by both level (Inicial-Superior) and topic on a bar to the right, and there are accompanying exercises and PDFs for printing with each. If students use the website for self-study, they can listen to an audio recording of the text while reading it, which I love.

A great resource for increasing motivation and enjoyment with real current events, culture, and technology. Nicely graded reading activities for increasing reading skills as well. Quite a find!

Tips from Texas

I thought I'd look to my own university and see what online resources are provided by the University of Texas Spanish department. Spanish Proficiency Exercises is an interesting website project in which collections of brief video clips show native speakers discussing specific topics. These topics are grouped together under themes like "What and where you study" (beginner), "Describe an ailment to doctor" (intermediate) and "Feelings about a current event" (advanced).

These video segments are designed to prepare students to discuss similar topics themselves, to increase their oral proficiency. Under each topic heading there are simplified, scripted videos in which the subjects speak slowly as well as unscripted, normal rate videos that include slang. During the videos, you can see the text in English, Spanish or not at all.

The site provides key vocabulary and phrases for each topic, both to accompany the videos and help learners to discuss the topic themselves.

I love having a series of videos about each topic. While the language and delivery can be challenging for students, having multiple videos about same topic allows students to approach the material with activated expectations and background knowledge. They can understand the gist quite easily and then focus attention on the more challenging aspects of the language. The mix of graded and unscripted language provides a nice challenge within a comprehensible framework.

These videos are best for accomplishing proficiency-oriented, communicative goals. They have the added bonus of including many regional Spanish accents.

BBC Languages

BBC puts together great resources for many languages, Spanish included. This website is for learners, and this website is for tutors and teachers.

The websites offer resources to be used online. Many of the activities for students are fill-in-the blank exercises with on-the-spot answer checking. Some of the activities have keyword or grammar boxes that you can print out and give to students to accompany the lesson, and some of the articles can be printed out.

Here are a few highlights:

• El Mensual is a feature with Spanish language news stories from around the world. You can browse by topic or by grammar point, and find articles with graded but fairly authentic language, mainly for intermediate level. For articles with a grammar focus, there are blanks to fill in and a mini-grammar guide. For those with a vocabulary focus, there is a thematically-linked word list to accompany the article.

• Episodes of Sueños, a simple Spanish TV series for learners, are available on the website, with video or audio-only available. Printable transcripts, word lists and phrase lists to accompany the short episodes are all available as well. These are simple, short, beginner-level, and focused around themes like "Buying things," "Healthy living," and "I like it."

Some of the resources aren't too exciting. For example, Mi Vida Loca, BBC's introductory Spanish video series, is extremely inauthentic and translation-based.

But on the whole it's a good resource for both beginners and intermediates, especially for supplementary videos and articles.