Material de referencia en inglés

9 Awesome Blogs for Learning English

This blog post on FluentU, an English language and culture blog, offers the links to and a detailed description of 9 other blogs for learning English in a fun and easy way.

22 English Podcasts Every English Learner Should Listen To

This blog post on FluentU, an English language and culture blog, offers the links to and a detailed description of 22 websites with a variety of English language podcasts to quickly improve your listening skills.

Academic Vocabulary

This site is intended to help students expand both their general academic vocabulary and the academic vocabulary of their field using the Academic Word List (AWL). This core academic vocabulary is used by writers in many different subject areas, and it can help students not only improve their comprehension of academic texts but also write assignments in an academic style.

Acronym Finder

This site offers over 1,000,000 human-edited definitions for acronyms and abbreviations. Terms can also be filtered by different categories. The site provides more than 850,000 US and Canadian postal codes as well.

Ambiguous Words

This is a list of words with several meanings. Different parts of speech, synonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms, and usage are provided for each entry, as well as a list of external links for further research. The word meaning database is supplied by WordNet, a lexical database for English supported by Princeton University.

BBC Learning English

This site, part of the BBC World Service, offers free audio, video and text materials to learners around the world. It provides multimedia English language teaching materials to meet learners needs and delivers them as full length courses, but each component of the course is standalone and can be studied on its own.

British Council

The British Council is the UK’s international organization for cultural relations and educational opportunities. The site offers high quality English language materials and resources for both learners and teachers.

British Council — LearnEnglish

This is a free website from the British Council to learn English online with games, stories, listening activities and grammar exercises. The site offers a wide variety of listening and video content, a grammar section, IELTS exam practice materials, and materials about business and work.

British Council — TeachingEnglish

This is a free website from the British Council to help teachers plan their lessons. The site offers hundreds of high-quality resources to use in the classroom as well as articles, videos, publications, and courses to help teachers with their continuing professional development.

British National Corpus

This site offers a word collection of over 100 million samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English, both spoken and written, from the late twentieth century. The written part of the BNC includes extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text. The spoken part consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations (recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way) and spoken language collected in different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins.

Cambridge Dictionary

This is the site of Cambridge University Press. It provides an English dictionary with definitions and synonyms, a learner's dictionary, an essential British English dictionary, an essential American English dictionary, and a grammar, as well as several bilingual dictionaries.

Cambridge English Language Assessment

Part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge, this site offers free activities and advice to students preparing for one of their exams, qualifications and practical resources to teachers to help them prepare learners for their exams, and support for organizations.

CNN International Edition

The website of the famous international television network offers a wide range of news stories and video reports from all over the world. It is very useful to learn about what is going on in the world while developing reading and listening skills.

Collins English Thesaurus

This online English thesaurus provides more than 500,000 words, meanings, phrases, synonyms, and antonyms of both British and American English.

Collins Free Online Dictionary

This site offers an English dictionary with more than 722,000 words, meanings and phrases, as well as their pronunciation, origin, synonyms, and usage examples. It also provides a thesaurus of both British and American English and several bilingual dictionaries.

Common Errors in English Usage

This page, within the website of Professor Paul Brians from Washington State University, provides a list of the most commonly confused words and phrases in English. It concerns mainly with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers.

Corpus of Contemporary American English

This online corpus of American English contains more than 520 million words of text and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. The interface allows you to search for exact words or phrases, wildcards, lemmas, part of speech, or any combinations of these, as well as for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window, which gives you good insight into the meaning and use of a word. The corpus also allows you to easily limit searches by frequency and compare the frequency of words, phrases, and grammatical constructions.

Dictionary.com

This site, whose main proprietary source is the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, provides millions of English definitions, spellings, audio pronunciations, example sentences, and word origins. It also offers a translation service, a word-of-the-day section, and a crossword solver.

English Profile — The CEFR for English

This is a collaborative programme endorsed by the Council of Europe, designed to create a “profile” or set of Reference Level Descriptions for English, which provide detailed information about what learners can do in English at each of the six levels of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), offering a clear benchmark for progress for English language learners. The site gives the background to the English Profile programme and provides access to resources, including the English Vocabulary Profile, which is a searchable listing of the words and phrases typically produced by English language learners at each level of the CEFR.

EnglishGrammar

This is a useful grammar website for both beginners and advanced learners of English who want to improve their writing skills in both personal and formal communications. It contains several articles related to each topic, videos, online exercises, and downloadable lessons.

Englishpage.com

This site offers a variety of free online English lessons and English as a second language (ESL) resources. The content is sorted into different sections, including a verb tense tutorial, advanced vocabulary lessons, a preposition and phrasal verb section, a grammar book, and a weekly lesson section. The site also hosts some English discussion forums.

ESL Tower

This is a free ESL/EFL site that offers useful printable and interactive English grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation exercises for teachers and students. Resources for teachers include worksheets and printable material for their classes; resources for students include self-study guides with online exercises on grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.

esl-lounge

This site gives free access to hundreds of ESL lesson plans and materials that can be used for communicative English lessons in the classroom. It focuses on communication and the majority of its resources are geared towards getting students talking. The site offers printable grammar worksheets, surveys, flashcards, reading comprehension and communication activities for each level, as well as board games, song lyrics and a section devoted to phonetics and the improvement of pronunciation.

Exam English

This website offers free online practice tests for the most important international ESL exams: IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, and the Cambridge English exams such as CAE, FCE, KET and PET. There are different levels to practice your grammar, use of English, writing, reading, or listening.

GCFLearnFree.org

This site of the Goodwill Community Foundation (GCF) helps users around the world learn the essential skills they need to live and work in the 21st century. From Microsoft Office and email to reading, math, and more, it offers over 180 topics, including more than 2,000 lessons, videos, and interactives and games, completely free.

Google Dictionary (by Google)

This is a free extension for Google Chrome that enables users to read definitions while browsing the Web. The main advantage of this add-on is that you can view the definition of a word by simply double-clicking it, without switching tabs. It can be downloaded here.

howjsay.com

This website offers a free online talking dictionary of English pronunciation. When your submitted entry appears in pink, just mouse over to hear it pronounced.

IDEA — International Dialects of English Archive

This site hosts an online archive of primary-source recordings of English dialects and accents as heard around the world. The recordings are principally in English, are of native speakers, and include both English-language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages — many include brief demonstrations of the speaker’s native language, too. Even though its main purpose is not educational, it is a useful tool for those who are interested in the study of dialects or just trying to improve their listening comprehension.

Journal of Academic Writing

This is the site of the Journal of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the teaching, tutoring, researching administration and development of academic writing in higher education in Europe.

Lang-8

This free language-exchange social network is a language learning platform where native speakers correct what users write. When users write an entry in any language they are learning, it appears to native speakers of that language, who correct it and leave useful comments and feedback.

Larousse — Bilingual dictionaries

This site offers several bilingual dictionaries, including a Spanish-English one, as well as the renowned French dictionary and a French encyclopedia.

Learn American English Online

This website provides free English language instruction to students all over the world. It has a collection of videos, lessons, exercises, quizzes, and links to other related sites.

LearnOutLoud.com

This site offers some of the best audio and video learning content on the Web. It provides users with over 50,000 audio books, podcasts, free downloads, and videos to learn from.

LibriVox

This site offers free public domain audiobooks read by volunteers from around the world. The audiobooks are free for anyone to listen to or download and save to their computers, iPods, or other mobile devices.

Linguee

This site offers a translation tool combining an English-Spanish dictionary with a search engine, which allows you to search billions of bilingual texts for words and expressions.

Lit2Go

This is a free online collection of stories and poems in MP3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF file and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material.

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online

This is the online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a useful tool that allows users to check not only the different meanings of a word but its pronunciation and collocations. It also provides spoken and written examples of the lexical items in different contexts.

Merriam-Webster

This is the site of the renowned American dictionary. It offers a dictionary and thesaurus, as well as videos, games, and links to a medical dictionary, a legal dictionary, and a Spanish-English dictionary.

MES English

This site offers resources for teachers of young learners. The resources are designed to be versatile and useful across a broad spectrum of ages and levels and include flashcards, worksheets and handouts to match, phonics worksheets, ESL games, certificate templates, and other activities all ready for printing.

Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals

This blog contains a series of movie segments and activities to assess or practice grammar points. The movie segments are included in lesson plans, and there are printable worksheets with answer keys available to download.

My English Pages

This website offers a large number of free English grammar lessons and exercises, as well as a series of teaching materials and shared resources for both teachers and students.

OneLook — Dictionary Search

This site hosts a search engine for words and phrases — when you enter a word, it provides a list of links to the web-based dictionaries that define that word. The site also offers a reverse dictionary, and its search engine indexes more than 19 million words in more than 1000 online dictionaries.

onestopenglish

This is a teacher resource site, part of Macmillan Education, one of the world’s leading publishers of English language teaching materials. It offers different resources, including lesson plans, worksheets, audios, videos, and flashcards. All materials are written and edited by a team of teachers and authors and are organized into core subject areas such as skills, grammar, vocabulary, and ESP.

Online English Grammar Book

This part of Englishpage.com provides a wide variety of resources and tools to learn and improve English grammar. The site is divided into several sections containing useful information about different topics.

OpenLearn

This is the home of free learning from The Open University. Though not specifically intended for language learning, the site has a variety of activities that teachers and advanced students can use, such as reading comprehension and listening exercises.

Oxford Glossary

This page within the website of the University of Oxford offers a valuable list of terms used at the university.

Oxford University Press

This site offers a wide range of online resources such as academic textbooks, journals, books for children, dictionaries, and general interest books aimed at students, librarians, academics and general readers.

ozdic.com

This site hosts a collocations dictionary. The entries are divided into sections according to part of speech, within which the collocations are grouped according to meaning or category. Many of the collocate groups have illustrative examples showing the collocations in context.

Pearltrees

This extension for Google Chrome allows users to organize and share any URL found online. Users can add web pages, files, photos, notes and more to their accounts and then arrange everything into collections. A collection works as a folder in which you can organize items or other collections.

phraseup*

Using a patent pending algorithm, this site assists users with writing, by suggesting possible combinations to fill-in the words they cannot remember. Each suggestion is accompanied by definitions, synonyms and translations to other languages.

Pod Academy

This is an independent, not-for-profit platform for free podcasts on academic research set up by a group of academics, journalists and IT specialists that aims to inform public debate and uncover intriguing and challenging new ideas.

Project Gutenberg

This site offers over 54,000 free ebooks, which can be downloaded as epub or kindle books, or read online. Users will find the world's great literature here, especially older works for which copyright has expired. The books are digitized and proofread with the help of volunteers.

Pronunciation Phonetics BBC

This is a YouTube channel with several videos from the BBC that provide clear and useful explanations to improve English pronunciation.

Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab

Here you will find more than 100 listening quizzes on everyday conversations with their own pre- and post-listening activities, vocabulary, grammar, and tips. The site also offers several videos to further practice your listening skills.

Real English

This website offers an interesting way of learning English as a second language through videos and interactive lessons. The site consists of an online video library of spontaneous dialogues of people interviewed on the streets of English-speaking countries, organized according to grammatical, lexical, and functional criteria used in the interactive exercises.

Reverso

This site provides a translator of words, sentences or even whole texts in a variety of languages other than English and Spanish, as well as their pronunciation. It also offers a dictionary and sections for grammar and spelling.

SkELL — Sketch Engine for Language Learning

This site hosts a Sketch Engine, a simple tool for students and teachers of English to easily check whether or how a particular phrase or word is used by real speakers of English. All examples, collocations and synonyms are identified automatically by ingenious algorithms and state-of-the-art software analyzing large multi-billion samples of text.

Speechyard

This site offers English learners an opportunity to improve their English and expand language knowledge by means of educational entertainment. Users can watch their favorite films and music videos, read books and learn colloquial phrases by means of creating their own library, and even communicate with other English learners all over the world.

Stanford Online

This site offers free online courses taught by Stanford faculty to lifelong learners worldwide, and a variety of professional education opportunities in conjunction with many of the University’s schools and departments.

Synonym.com

This website provides synonyms, antonyms, and definitions of the word you type in. Entries are sorted according to their different meanings, grammatical category, and usage. It also provides an inline editor, where you can paste or type your text to see synonym suggestions for every word.

TalkEnglish.com

This site provides English lessons in the form of text and audio files. The content is sorted into different categories, such as regular English, business English, traveler English, interview English, and useful phrases. The site also uses message boards, forums, and bulletin boards to help users learn English.

TED

This is a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where technology, entertainment and design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 110 languages.

The Idioms — Largest Idioms Dictionary

This is an educational website which provides the meaning, origin and examples of the world’s most famous idioms, sayings, slang and phrases, thus helping users to improve and refine their English language.

The Law Dictionary

This free online dictionary features the 2nd edition of Black’s Law Dictionary, which contains over 15,000 legal terms for business and research use.

The Phrase Finder

This site hosts a searchable database with the origins and meanings of thousands of English sayings, phrases, idioms, and expressions. It includes a browser, a phrase thesaurus, and a discussion forum, which is now closed to new queries but remains online as a reference archive.

The Punctuation Guide

This is an interactive website which focuses on American punctuation and provides a thorough analysis of every punctuation mark, including examples and common mistakes. It also attends to other problematic areas, such as punctuating titles and style.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)

This site of Purdue University of Indiana offers over 200 free resources, including writing and teaching writing, research, grammar and mechanics, style guides, ESL (English as a Second Language), and job search and professional writing.

The Times

The website of the famous British daily national newspaper based in London offers a wide range of news stories from Britain and all over the world. It is very useful to learn about what is going on in both Britain and the world while developing reading skills.

The Writing Center

The George Mason University Writing Center, which is aimed primarily at the university’s students, faculty, and staff, helps users in the process of writing. The site offers a useful section with writing resources and tips, as well as several downloadable files with information concerning basic grammar, composing and revising.

TheFreeDictionary

This site offers an English dictionary and thesaurus, as well as a medical dictionary, a legal dictionary, a financial dictionary, a dictionary of acronyms, a dictionary of idioms, an encyclopedia, and a link to Wikipedia. Each entry comes with its synonyms or related words, antonyms, and translations to several languages. The site also allows users to customize their homepage.

Thesaurus.com

This site, a part of Dictionary.com, helps users improve their mastery of the English language and find the precise word with over 3 million synonyms and antonyms. Search results can be filtered by relevance, word length, and complexity.

Type IPA phonetic symbols for English

This page within the website TypeIt allows users to easily type phonetic transcriptions of English words in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). You can edit your text in the box provided and then copy it to your document, e-mail message, etc. The site also offers a full set of IPA phonetic symbols for all languages.

UEfAP — Using English for Academic Purposes

This site is a useful guide to the use of English for academic purposes for students in higher education. It contains guidelines on punctuation, reading and vocabulary choices, as well as other valuable information about academic writing.

Urban Dictionary

This is a crowdsourced online dictionary of slang words and phrases that are not usually found in standard dictionaries. Users with either a Facebook or Gmail account can make a submission to the dictionary, and all entries are reviewed and rated by volunteer editors and site visitors.

UsingEnglish.com

This is a general English language site, specialising in ESL (English as a Second Language) with a wide range of resources for learners and teachers of English — forums, quizzes and useful advice on teaching, as well as a wide range of articles about punctuation, spelling and other aspects of the language. The site uses different varieties of English — there are contributors from the United States, Canada, Pakistan and non-native speakers, but much of the site uses British English as it was set up in the UK.

Visual Dictionary Online

This is an interactive dictionary with an innovative approach — from the image to the word and its definition, it is an all-in-one reference. You can search the themes to quickly locate words, or find the meaning of a word by viewing the image it represents. The dictionary helps users learn English in a visual and accessible way and it is a valuable tool for teachers, parents, translators and students of all skill levels.

Vocabulary.com

This site provides an easy and intelligent way to improve vocabulary by combining an adaptive learning system with a very fast dictionary so that users can learn words quickly and efficiently.

Word in Context

This website provides users with a long list of examples of a certain word in its different contexts. The examples are extracted from a variety of books and there is a link under each quotation for users to download the books if they please.

WordReference.com

This site offers a series of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries with lots of examples, as well as synonyms, idioms, and sayings. It also hosts language forums, a repository of knowledge and advice about English and a number of other languages.

YourDictionary

This site hosts a dictionary with simple, easy-to-understand definitions and different tools to help users choose their words precisely. This is a comprehensive reference site with synonyms, sentence examples, quotes, biographies, and a collection of grammar-related articles and education resources for both students and teachers, as well as a Spanish-English dictionary.