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Online encyclopedia of writing systems

The study of foreign languages and literature provides valuable experience and a potential edge for future career development for our students. Scientists and engineers function in a global market: they rely on primary sources published in other languages, attend international consortia, and often find themselves interacting across national, cultural, and linguistic borders. Government and industry often give preference to job applicants who are proficient in a foreign language. MIT students are encouraged to work and study abroad in conjunction with university, private, and public organizations. The faculty of the FL&L Section, the language coordinators, and the Undergraduate Academic Administrator can provide assistance in choosing an appropriate program and granting transfer credit from overseas or domestic programs. MIT provides a unique perspective on foreign languages because of the opportunities available to integrate the study of natural languages with the latest technological advances in multimedia and interactive learning. FL&L-affiliated faculty are exploring and implementing methods in which multimedia technology can be used to make learning a foreign language a more authentic experience.

The Teaching Foreign Languages workshop will help K-12 foreign language teachers improve their practice by making connections between the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning and current research in foreign language education. Workshop components include eight lively half-hour video programs with leading researchers and practicing teachers discussing how the standards play out in day-to-day classroom situations, a workshop guide available online and in print, and interactive activities on the Web.

This Advanced Spanish Language and Culture course is a rigorous course taught exclusively in Spanish that requires students to improve their proficiency across the three modes of communication:  Interpretive, Interpersonal and Presentational.  The course focuses on the integration of authentic resources including online print, audio, and audiovisual resources, as well as traditional print resources that include literature, essays, and magazine and newspaper articles with the goal of providing a rich, diverse learning experience. Students communicate using rich, advanced vocabulary and linguistic structures as they build proficiency in all modes of communication toward the advanced level.  Class is conducted completely in Spanish and includes frequent writing and integration of skills with a rigorous review of grammatical structures. Advanced organizational and analytical strategies are taught. An array of resources is used as necessary to facilitate the learning process.

Dictation exercises online

This site, aimed at Spanish language learners, educators, and researchers, provides an online corpus of videos of second language and heritage language learners of Spanish during oral interviews covering a variety of topics.  These particular videos are derived from the Spanish Proficiency Training & Learner Corpus, a website that comprises over 320 videos of Spanish language learners.  The present website provides supplemental activities to help viewers investigate learners' language and proficiency levels in connection with Lingüística aplicada:  adquisición del español como segunda lengua (Koike & Klee, 2003), a textbook on Spanish applied linguistics.

Learn and practice languages for free!  Classroom appropriate