Online resources
Our staff has developed and continues to develop a series of free online resources for students interested in learning foreign languages.
These resources, which showcase the languages and cultures we teach, have been and will continue to be organised in the form of free online courses available through UCLeXtend.
The Languages and Cultures Show and Tell is a self-directed online course made up of a series of short taster videos and related activities showcasing some of the languages and cultures we teach at the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS). Each session is designed around an item from the UCL Art Collections as a starting point.
The videos can be used by individuals and/or schools. While each one showcases a specific aspect or theme, the sessions are connected with each other in different ways, offering a range of different pathways. You could, for instance choose to explore the material according to language groups: Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) vs Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish). This may help you to notice the similarities and difference between these groups. Alternatively, you can follow a thematic pathway: travel is the topic of the Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish tasters, for instance.
Once you have engaged with our materials, you can contribute to our ongoing online exhibition of languages and cultures. Choose an object and write a 200-word post using our Padlet site explaining how it showcases one or more aspects of a language and culture.
This course is free to access but you will be asked to provide some details about why and how you intend to use the content. To access the courses please complete the following anonymous questionnaire. Once you have completed the form, you will receive an automatic reply with the access code to the course. Create a UCLeXtend account and use the code to obtain guest access to the online course. Once you have used the materials, we would also encourage you to fill in the evaluation questionnaire attached to the courses. This information is anonymous and will be used solely for the scope of developing further resources.
Other online resources
Here is a list of other useful resources collated by our staff members on a number of subject areas linked to foreign languages:
Black Central Europe Project
There are over 1 million Black people in Central Europe today. Most Europeans still don’t know of the long history of the Black Diaspora in their countries. As a result, there is a general assumption that Black people are a relatively new presence on the continent and thus are historical and national outsiders. Through historical investigation, Black Central Europe challenges these assumptions.
For more information about this, please contact Dr Jeff Bowersox, Associate Professor of German History, at j.bowersox@ucl.ac.uk
French Language Resources
A list of freely available online French language resources (PDF file) compiled by Marie Fournier and Thibaut Raibon from UCL French:
The Slave Woman (1887)
This is a video about the Brazilian writer Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825-1917) was recorded for the Glasgow Women’s Library Digital Book Club. A short story by this author has been translated into English and is available here.
For more information about this, please contact Dr. Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies, at a.surianidasilva@ucl.ac.uk.
Publications by UCL Press
Launched in 2015, UCL Press has quickly established itself as a high-quality open access university press. So far, they have published over 140 open access books, and also publish 13 open access journals.
Several members of staff from our School have published with them and you can download these publications free of charge from UCL Press’s website. An example of this is Introduction to Nordic Culture (edited by Annika Lindskog and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen).
It is an innovative, interdisciplinary introduction to Nordic history, cultures and societies from medieval times to today. The textbook spans the whole Nordic region, covering historical periods from the Viking Age to modern society, and engages with a range of subjects: from runic inscriptions on iron rings and stone monuments, via eighteenth-century scientists, Ibsen’s dramas and turn-of-the-century travel, to twentieth-century health films and the welfare state, nature ideology, Greenlandic literature, Nordic Noir, migration, ‘new’ Scandinavians, and stereotypes of the Nordic.