Lately I have been using a lot of Spanish resources from the Mary Glasgow website. Mary Glasgow is the name of a teacher who started her career as a French teacher in the 1950s, and subsequently became a school inspector. Frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm shown by teenage pupils, and by what she felt was the limited appeal of the French textbooks, Mary decided to publish her own series of French magazines. The magazines covered all the subjects that her teenage students loved – music, sport, film at a language level that they were comfortable with. Nowadays, Mary Glasgow is a company which has developed a range of 16 magazines – for learners of English, French, German, and Spanish.

I find that the website is very clear and offers a lot of resources related to the different topics we have to teach at IGCSE level. Some resources are free, for some others you have to subscribe. My favourite rubric is "Noticias" where you can access Spanish articles (for free) which you can choose to read at the level you wish (basic, pre-intermediate or intermediate). Along with each article, you can download the audio version of it for free, which makes it for a nice listening activity in class. Each audio is recorded with a different accent (Spanish from Spain, Argentina, Mexico...) so that students can get used to different ways of pronouncing the words.

How do I use those articles? I copy and paste them onto a Word document and I then add some comprehension questions in Spanish. I also download the audio. In class I write some listening comprehension questions on the board. My students listen to the article and answer the questions on the board. I then give them the Word document where they can read and listen to the article. They highlight the answers in the article to the questions from the board. They then answer the reading comprehension questions. That way they do a listening followed by a reading activity. With my grade 10 class (they will pass the IGCSE exam at the end of the school year), we have worked on birthdays and celebrations and they have completed two activities on "la quinceñera" and "la Merced" which were articles taken from Mary Glasgow. You can download the resources I created on my wiki.

What about you? Which websites do you like to use to access resources?