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!

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.

A Professor's Page

Barbara Kuczun Nelson, a professor at Colby College in Maine, has such a devoted following among her students that there is a Facebook fan club in her honor (seriously, see "Barbara Kuczun Nelson was sent from heaven").

Her Spanish Language & Culture website is clean, easy to use and full of resources for both teachers and students. Originally called Spanish Grammar Exercises, the site focuses on grammar points, which are listed neatly on one side for easy reference.

The cultural focus is pervasive. Authentic songs, stories and videos (with subtitles) from Spain and Latin America are used to introduce and practice grammar, with loads of audio and visual support, self-checking exercises and verb charts. There are mini-cultural lessons like this one sobre el Día de Los Muertos that would be great for classroom use, and time dictation exercises for students to review on their own.

A great resource for culture and grammar review!