LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Runner-up of the student award 2010: Encouraging school pupils to study languages, linguistics or area studies at university

Sarah Louise Badrock, a 1st year Middle Eastern and Modern European Language student at the University of Manchester, was a runner up in the Subject Centre's undergraduate student award competition 2010.

Promoting less-widely-taught languages. The outreach experience of the Foreign Language Awareness Group for Schools (FLAGS)

In the current downward trend in the uptake of languages, and especially of less-widely-taught languages, FLAGS aims at enthusing sixth-formers with an interest in either Italian, Russian and / or Portuguese through a series of language sessions delivered through the Virtual Learning Environment WebCT. Pupils' progress is aided and monitored by University students, who act as language facilitators on a weekly basis. This paper assesses the outcomes at the end of the first year of FLAGS' life, as well as the challenges met during the project's setting-up period and throughout its duration.

Call for papers - special issue of Language Learning Journal

Papers are invited for a forthcoming special issue of the Language Learning Journal, the official journal of the Association for Language Learning (ALL), on Languages of the Wider World: Valuing Diversity.

Portuguese: Corpus do Português (45 million words, 1300-1999)
This corpus allows you to quickly and easily search more than 45 million words in more than 50,000 Portuguese texts from the 1300s to the 1900s. The interface allows you to search for exact words or phrases, substrings, lemmas, part of speech, or any combinations of these. You can also search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window. This corpus has been funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, and is now freely available online.

Portuguese language online
The aim of this website is to provide easy access to a range of up-to-date materials which will both complement formal classroom activities and facilitate and enhance independent and distant learning of Portuguese.

Language Testing: Dialang: Diagnostic Tests for Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish

DIALANG offers validated tests of different language skills, together with a range of feedback and expert advice on how to improve your skills. It also offers scientifically validated self-assessment activities and allows users to determine their language level, strengths and weaknesses as well as to increase their awareness of current skills and of what it means to know a language. It has been developed by more than 20 major European institutions, with the backing of the European Commission and is based on the Council of Europe's "Common European Framework of reference", which has become established throughout Europe as the most widely recognized frame of reference in the field of language learning.

Extending good practice in less widely used less taught (LWULT) languages

Iberian studies in the UK
The article offers a brief history of the development of Spanish and Portuguese Studies in the UK and their inter-relatedness with Iberian, Hispanic, and Latin American Studies. It lays out current coverage of linguistics, film, gender, cultural, area, and literary studies relating to Spanish and Portuguese both at BA and MA level; it also covers the teaching of Portuguese language and, more briefly, Catalan and Galician languages and cultures.

Latin American studies in the UK
An outline of the development and current provision of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching of Latin American Studies in UK universities. While concentrating on single honours and joint degrees, it also gives an indication of how Latin American themes are incorporated into other degree programmes.