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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Get to know the Open Language Resource Center!

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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!

A Program for Professional Growth Based on Collaboration

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Over the past three years, COERLL has been working on several projects that require participation from language instructors; a new realm for a language center accustomed to making language learning materials with small teams of faculty and graduate students.

In order to jumpstart these participatory projects, we started a “COERLL Collaborators” program to mentor teachers and give visibility (and some funding) to their work, while spreading the use of open licenses and starting a network for our projects. Participants in the COERLL Collaborators program have helped COERLL tremendously over the past year or so, by testing and providing insights into our projects.

We piloted COERLL Collaborators for FLLITE (Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday), a project with CERCLL (Center for Educational Resources in Culture Language and Literacy) in which teachers write multiliteracies lessons around an authentic resource, receive peer review feedback, and have their lesson published on fllite.org. The FLLITE team chose three graduate students to go through this process, based on lesson proposals they submitted.

These lessons are now published on the project website for anyone to use, and exemplify how a teacher can transform their interests into a completely original lesson.

  • Natasha César-Suárez photographed an image from Spain’s 15-M movement and turned it into a lesson on language in social movements.
  • Marcelo Fuentes developed an image of a letter to God found in a Chilean church into a cultural lesson and letter writing activity.
  • Carol Ready used a poem by Pablo Neruda to teach students about the impact of commercial food production on Latin America through the study of descriptive language.

For our digital badging partnership with Austin Independent School District, which awards teachers digital badges for professional development based on the TELL (Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning) Framework, we chose three more Collaborators. The three teachers agreed to attend professional development and personal mentorship sessions organized by Thymai Dong, AISD’s World Languages Coordinator, and to earn digital badges related to the topics of the sessions.

Unfortunately administrative changes stopped us from seeing this process through to the end, but the COERLL Collaborators still received some mentorship and challenged themselves to take risks and reflect on their teaching.

  • Rachel Preston developed her own professional growth plan based on a self-assessment of her teaching, which led to an increase in her students’ self-assessment, reflection and goal-setting.
  • Tania Shebaro got motivated at a workshop to scrap her lesson plans for the next day and rewrite everything, leading to engaging and participatory class sessions.
  • Janeth Medrano attended every professional development event possible to get new resources and tools she could adapt for her students.

Thank you to all six of our Collaborators – they have taught us, in addition to teaching their students!

Six more COERLL Collaborators are now busy perfecting some new FLLITE lessons in Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, and German, and we are narrowing down COERLL Collaborators applications for our Heritage Spanish project. We are looking forward to expanding the COERLL Collaborators program and building up a network of creative and collaborative language instructors.

See what the COERLL Collaborators have created:

Best of MERLOT: Award-Winning World Language Resources

By Laura Franklin

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In my last post, I blogged about the de rigueur French sites I share with my community college students through the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT). In addition to these, I must mention that there are almost 2,500 World Languages materials in MERLOT, not just in French, but in Arabic, Chinese, ESL, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish and many other languages. There are simulations, animations, blogs, word clouds, virtual art galleries and recording studios, tutorials, videos, webquests and worksheets. The cost is just a bit of your time.

One of the most effective ways to find the best of MERLOT is by exploring the recipients of our World Languages Editor’s Choice and MERLOT Classics Awards. The Classic Award winners are chosen among outstanding online resources designed to enhance teaching and learning. The Editor’s Choice Award is an honor bestowed on one excellent learning material among all the Classics Award winners. An easy way to peruse all the award-winning resources is to visit the About MERLOT Awards/Exemplary Materials page,  

Top 3 Editor’s Choice Recipients
  1. LangMedia consists of a collection of target language videos done by international students from the Five Colleges of Massachusetts in their home countries. Videos in languages from Arabic to Wolof are included with transcripts, images and realia. See videos of French as it is spoken in a variety of Francophone nations, Spanish in the Spanish-speaking world, etc. There is also a substantial Bangla/Bengali collection, Czech, Croatian and on through the alphabet of languages. In addition to the language videos, there are also CultureTalk series  that are coded for elementary, middle school and high school classes. These resources can enhance language courses anywhere or be used by prospective travelers to the regions.
  2. Ojalá que llueva café  is a timeless favorite of Spanish teachers and learners everywhere for its embedding of culture, grammar and structure. Completely in the target language, it not only contains a glossed reading of the popular song by Juan Luis Guerra, it features a beautiful photo gallery of the Dominican Republic and many exercises to teach the subjunctive in an engaging way. Author Barbara K. Nelson, went on to create many modules using a similar format in her five-star Spanish.language&culture site.
  3. Lingu@net Worldwide  (formerly Lingu@netEuropa) catalogues some 3,500 learning materials all geared toward learning languages. Linguanet Worldwide allows users to discern their learning styles, to find conversation partners and to locate resources to enhance their knowledge of the target language and culture. The resources it points to reach a wide and diverse potential audience: casual learners of languages in a variety of age groups, students of languages for professional or academic reasons and others.

I hope this tour of the best of MERLOT inspires Open Up readers to submit their own work to MERLOT World Languages and to comment upon what they find in our collections. For instance, what features do you want to see that are not already in MERLOT now?

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LauraLaura Franklin teaches French online at the Extended Learning Institute, Northern Virginia Community College. She is one of the original Co-Editors of MERLOT World Languages. For information on becoming a MERLOT World Languages Peer Reviewer, contact Laura at lfranklin@nvcc.edu.

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To find more OER for languages, see Open Up on Open Education Week.