Nearly 700 miles north of COERLL, you will find the Open Language Resource Center (OLRC). The OLRC, located at the University of Kansas, shares COERLL’s focus on the creation and promotion of Open Educational Resources and is likewise a National Foreign Language Resource Center. Founded in 2018, the OLRC sponsors projects that strike a careful balance between breadth of audience and degree of need, prioritizing OER that are of a scale to replace or significantly supplement commercial curricula. Current projects include:
Chinese
Ting Yi Ting: Listening Makes Perfect is an online guide that enables learners to hear and identify phonemic categories in Mandarin, including lexical tones, in a variety of phonetic contexts and to associate those phonemes with correct Pinyin orthography.
French
Le pont is a complete curriculum that provides a bridge to help students who are transitioning from intermediate to advanced proficiency. Chapters 1-3 are available as PDF downloads with chapters 4-8 forthcoming.
German
Incorporating Corpora is an online manual on the use of corpora to teach German to English-speaking learners, providing one of the few corpora manuals for instructors of languages other than English.
Kiswahili
Hujambo! is a first-year Kiswahili textbook that chronicles the adventures of two American students studying abroad in Tanzania. Chapters of this textbook will be released in a serialized fashion with the first half of the book released this summer.
Russian
Russian Aspect in Conversation is an online, modular manual to perfecting the aspectual category of Russian verbs by training the learner to focus on understanding and interpreting aspectual usage. Work on this project began Fall of 2020 with the first modules to be released later this year.
Spanish
Acceso is an online curriculum for intermediate-level learners of Spanish that can be adopted as a complete curriculum or as a supplement to an existing curriculum.
Turkish
Konuşan Paragraflar (Talking Paragraphs) is a complete curriculum aimed at helping English-speaking learners of Turkish move from the intermediate to advanced level. Chapters of this textbook will be released in a serialized fashion with the first half of the book released this summer.
Ukrainian
Dobra forma provides an online, modular overview of Ukrainian grammar with contextualized activities that enable students to internalize correct grammatical forms as they focus on the communication of meaning.
If you are looking for additional foreign language OER materials or are interested in creating your own, COERLL and OLRC invite you to register for their upcoming Foreign Language OER Conference at the end of Open Education Week on Saturday March 6th. Attendance is free but registration is required!
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