LibGuides: English: Useful Websites

Doing in-depth research?

Search these recommended databases for your research projects, dissertations and theses.

17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers This link opens in a new window The newspapers, pamphlets, and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media.
JSTOR Arts & Sciences I Collection This link opens in a new window JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences.
Nexis UK This link opens in a new window Nexis UK is a web based service that contains full text coverage of many hundreds of British, American, International and European national and regional newspapers, together with international trade and industry magazines, marketing and advertising sources plus business and industry newsletters. Several news sources have up to 20 years backfile. Also included in the company and news section are company reports from over 50 countries.
SAGE Journals Online This link opens in a new window SAGE Publications is an independent international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media.
Scopus This link opens in a new window Scopus is a comprehensive, bibliographic database covering scientific, medical, technical and social science subjects.
Taylor and Francis Online Journals This link opens in a new window Taylor & Francis Online hosts multidisciplinary, scholarly journals and reference works.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window Web of Science provides seamless access to the Science Citation Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, and Medline.

Reference Resources

The following resources are recommended for gaining a general understanding of a particular subject area:

Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics Online
The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, first published in 1994, with a 2nd edition in 2006, is an encyclopedia of all matters related to language and linguistics
Green’s dictionary of slang
Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang. Written by Jonathon Green over 17 years from 1993, it reached the printed page in 2010 in a three-volume set containing nearly 100,000 entries supported by over 400,000 citations from c. ad 1000 to the present day. The main focus of the dictionary is the coverage of over 500 years of slang from c. 1500 onwards.
Handbook of Pragmatics Online
This electronic encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updatable source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. For off-campus access you will need to use the separate username/password available in the 'Library Matters' module on BlackBoard.
Oxford Reference Online
Oxford Reference Online consists of a wealth of facts, figures, definitions, and translations found in dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press.

Linguistics

The following resources may be useful for the study of language and linguistics:

British National Corpus
The British National Corpus is a very large (over 100 million words) corpus of modern English, both spoken and written.
Etymonline
"Online Etymology Dictionary. This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago."
Lingbuzz
Article archive for open access linguistics articles.
Linguistics Working Papers Directory
Index to online linguistics working papers collections. Follow the links to different institutions to see their publications in the field of linguistics.
Open Semiotics Resource Center
The purpose of this site is to provide innovative, responsible and reliable knowledge in a variety of domains relevant to semiotics understood as the multidisciplinary study of information, meaning, communication, interpretation, sign systems and evolution, texts, interactions, organizations, cultural and social transformations, sense-making and all other topics that may emerge from future research, models and theories.
Phonetics sound project – sounds of English, German and Spanish
This site contains animated libraries of the phonetic sounds of (American) English, German and Spanish.

Teaching English

The following links may help if you are looking for resources relating to teaching English as a foreign/second language:

TESL-EJ – free reviewed journal
TESL-EJ began as the brainchild of a group of scholars who saw the need for a freely-distributed electronic academic journal. It has grown to become an internationally- recognized source of ESL and EFL information for people in scores of countries.
TESOL homepage
The homepage of TESOL Internation Association, a professional organization for teachers of English as a second or foreign language
Using English
UsingEnglish.com provides a large collection of English as a Second Language (ESL) tools & resources for students, teachers, learners and academics.
Linguapress
Free teacher and student resources for the study of English as a foreign language. Reading resources, grammar resources, and games.