Bates Library - Resources for Basic Education

See Also: Resources for General Education

Skills Tutor - Online tutoring in many subjects, at a choice of difficulty levels. Sign up at Bates Library or Tech Center, on Downtown or South campus.
WOIS Test Prep - Practice for GED, SAT, PSAT, ACT, ASVAB, or any of several CLEP exams. To register, see a Bates Library staff member.
Culture Grams - Brief information on language, religion, family life, food, and other cultural topics for hundreds of countries.
InfoTrac - Magazine and journal articles on a broad range of subjects.
ProQuest - Magazine and journal articles on a broad range of subjects.

What do the symbols mean? (Contact the library for current passwords.)

A user name and password are required for off-campus use.
An individual user name and password are required for both on-campus and off-campus use.

Click on the links below for selected books or search the entire online catalog.

ESL Books, Videos, and Audio Materials

GED Books and Videos

Basic Math Books and Videos

Reading and Writing Skills: Books, Videos, and Audio

Books and Videos at Other Libraries

Acronym Finder - Dictionary of acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations. Results can be sorted by discipline.
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. - Contains over 90,000 entries.
Dictionary.com - Features a variety of different types of dictionaries.
Language Dictionaries - Links to foreign language dictionaries.
Lexicool.com - Links to “over 3500 bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and glossaries freely available on the Internet.” Includes many specialized subject dictionaries.
PROMTs Online Translator - Translates text, web pages and email from one language into another (includes English, Russian, Spanish, French, German and Italian). Includes online keyboards for inputting non-English characters.
Rustran.com: Stream Translation Technologies - English to Russian and Russian to English dictionary and online translator.
Romanian/English translation dictionaries:
Specialty Dictionaries - Links to dictionaries on specialized topics.
Travelangs Foreign Languages for Travelers
Vdict.com - Vietnamese dictionaries
YourDictionary - Chinese dictionaries.

Activities for ESL Students - A project of The Internet TESL Journal, which contains over 1,000 activities for ESL students.
Dave's ESL Café - Activities, quizzes, discussion boards and other ESL connections.
Diagramming Sentences - The basics of sentence diagramming.
Grammarman - Upper level practice correcting grammatical mistakes in comic strip errors.
Guide to Grammar & Writing - Easy to understand explanations about English grammar and writing. Includes an index. Provided by Capital Community College.
Interesting Things for ESL Students - Interactive web site with word games, puzzles, quizzes, slang, proverbs, etc.
The Internet TESL Journal - Monthly web journals for teachers of ESL students.
Karin's ESL PartyLand - Many different ESL activities for all levels.
Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab
Spanish GED Resources - This site, from Portland Community College, is "designed to provide the student with support to prepare and study for the five subject areas included in the GED in Spanish exam: mathematics, literature, essay writing, natural sciences and social science."

Gedpractice.com - Steck-Vaughn web site to help you with the types of items you will see on the actual GED test.
Spanish GED Resources - This site, from Portland Community College, is "designed to provide the student with support to prepare and study for the five subject areas included in the GED in Spanish exam: mathematics, literature, essay writing, natural sciences and social science."

Casa de Joanna: Language Accent Alternatives - Gives instructions on how to use your computer to input language accents and foreign language characters into your documents and web pages.
Mulitlingual Glossary of Library Terms
PROMTs Online Translator - Translates text, web pages and email from one language into another (includes English, Russian, Spanish, French, German and Italian). Includes online keyboards for inputting non-English characters.
ProZ - Choose your language pair and your field of interest.
Rustran.com: Stream Translation Technologies - English to Russian and Russian to English dictionary and online translator.
Travelangs Foreign Languages for Travelers

BBC - Skillswise.
“How do I use my graphing calculator?” - From the Mathematics Department, at Tacoma Community College.
Manipula Math with Java
Math.com - From math to calculus.
Purplemath - “Your Algebra Resource.”

Brain Food - Logic puzzles, word puzzles, and more.
Internet Coach Puzzle Center - Make your own puzzles.
Puzzle maker - Discovery Education web site for creating puzzles that can be printed out using your own word lists. Puzzle types include: "Word Search," "Criss-Cross," "Hidden Message," "Number Blocks," "Double Puzzles," and "Letter Tiles."

Bartleby.com - Search encyclopedias, thesauri, usage guides, selected stories, essays, poems, and more.
HowStuffWorks - Clear explanations of the workings of rainbows, guitars, locks, diesel engines, and "you name it."
Refdesk.com - Claims to be "the single best source for facts on the Net."

How to Study - Tips and resources to help improve your organizational and study skills, from Chemeketa Community College, in Oregon.
Study Guides and Strategies - Study guides for testing, reading, writing, classroom participation, etc. Guides are available in a variety of languages. Provided by the University of St. Thomas ISS/Learning Center in St. Paul, MN.