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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Finding a Language Partner on the Other Side of the World

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Photo credit: “Skype Friend” by flickr user Greg Balzer Creative Commons License

From the editor: Though teachers are our main audience, we realize many people use our materials to learn languages independently. For our readers who are dedicated independent language learners, guest blogger Chi Fang shares his experience learning with a native speaker language partner, and gives advice on how to find a language partner of your own.

When I decided to learn Spanish, I got started in seconds by downloading Duolingo on my phone, and found plenty of free grammar exercises and audio courses online. I learned the basic grammar rules and memorized several hundred words of vocabulary. But I still didn’t know how to SPEAK Spanish.

Most people want to learn a language so that they can speak it, but the majority of language courses and apps can’t prepare us for the real thing. This is something that I struggled with. All the concepts I studied seemed to go out the window when I was faced with a real-life situation where I had to listen to what someone was saying, think of a response and form sentences, all in a matter of seconds.

I realized that the only way to get better at this was by having more conversations, which meant finding someone to practice with for one or two hours per week. I found someone online, and since then I’ve learned a lot about choosing the right language partner.

Your language partner should be a native speaker of the language that you are trying to learn. He/she will help you practice their language and in exchange, you will help them improve their English. For example, my Guatemalan partner and I used to have one hour Skype conversations, where we would speak in Spanish for 30 minutes, and then switch to English for 30 minutes.

Please note that your partner is not a professional teacher. They can correct your mistakes, but they may not be able to explain the theory behind what you did wrong. Most native speakers don’t know the exact grammar rules of their own language, they just know what sounds “right.”

There are several free online language exchanges that will connect you to language partners from around the world. You can browse through their profiles and send them a message to set up a video call. Here are some things to think about when selecting a language partner:

  • Priorities: How serious is the person about improving their language skills?
  • Commitment: Are they willing to set aside time every week? Does their schedule line up with yours?
  • Proficiency: Is their English level close to your proficiency in their language? Otherwise, it can be intimidating to speak with someone who is more advanced.
  • Patience: Is your partner willing to help you as much as you are willing to help them?

You and your partner should set the rules from the very beginning:

  • How long should the session be?
  • Will you strictly speak in your target language or is it okay to revert to English once in a while?
  • How often do you want to be corrected?
  • Which topics would you like to talk about? Which topics are off-limits?

    • For example, I told my partner that I wanted them to mercilessly correct me for every mistake I make. However, this approach isn’t for everyone.

    It is also important to maintain a 50/50 balance between languages to ensure that you are both benefiting equally from the exchange. Don’t be afraid to use a timer to enforce this balance.

    Lastly, you need to manage your own expectations. Not all conversations will go smoothly, and finding the right language partner for you will involve some degree of trial and error. But when you do find that perfect person, it can make a world of difference in your language learning journey.

    —

    Chi Fang is an entrepreneur and blogger. He speaks English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Polish, and he frequently travels the world to study languages and culture. Chi is the founder of the online language learning company Verbalicity, and is currently based in Canada.

OER for a Common Goal – Meeting the Needs of Spanish Heritage Learners

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Editors note: This post was written by COERLL partner Jocelly Meiners, and originally published in Tex Libris, the blog from the libraries at the University of Texas at Austin, for a special Open Education Week series.

In recent years, the development of Spanish language courses designed specifically for heritage language learners has gained much attention throughout K-12 and post-secondary education in the US. Heritage language learners are students who were exposed to Spanish at home while growing up. These students usually have a broad knowledge about their cultural heritage, and varying degrees of language dominance. Over the years, it has been found that these learners have different pedagogical needs than second language learners, and that they benefit greatly from language instruction that is catered to their specific needs. Throughout the country, as more institutions realize these needs, Spanish instructors at all levels are forming programs and creating materials to serve this student population. It seems that we all have some common goals: to help heritage Spanish speakers develop their bilingual skills, to empower them to apply those skills in academic and professional settings, and to feel proud of their cultural and linguistic heritage. So if we all have similar goals in mind and are all working on creating programs and materials to serve these students, why not share all the work we are doing?

I have been teaching courses for heritage Spanish learners here at UT for over 4 years, and about a year and a half ago I started working as the community moderator for the Heritage Spanish Community. This web-based community, which is hosted by COERLL (The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning), serves as a space for Spanish instructors to collaborate, share and communicate with others about the teaching and learning of Spanish as a heritage language. We encourage instructors at all levels to ask questions on our online forum, to help other instructors, and to share the materials they are working on. Open Educational Resources are an excellent way to share these types of materials, since they can easily be adapted to the specific needs of each instructor’s particular student population.

As community moderator, I add useful content to our website, create interesting questions for discussion, and encourage others to explore our website and share their work. I have also been able to share my own materials as OER, and it has been very rewarding to hear from people in other parts of the country who have found my resources useful and are adapting them for their own heritage Spanish programs. I believe that if we all collaborate and share our resources openly, we will be much more successful in attaining both our personal and common goals.

Jocelly Meiners was born and raised in San José, Costa Rica and moved to Austin, TX to attend UT, where she obtained her undergraduate education, as well as an MA in French linguistics and a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics. She is currently a Lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UT, where she teaches courses for Spanish heritage learners.

Empowering Learners of Spanish

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From the Editor: This is a guest post about a new set of openly licensed activities “Empowering Learners of Spanish”, by Claudia Holguín Mendoza, Robert L. Davis, Julie Weise (University of Oregon) and Munia Cabal Jiménez (Western Illinois University).

We want to share with students and educators the Empowering Learners of Spanish project from Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. This collection of activities based on Critical Pedagogies developed in the Spanish as a Heritage Language program at the University of Oregon, serves to introduce students to a range of concepts in sociolinguistics and critical inquiry into language ideologies.

The activities are written in both English and Spanish, and resources are also in both languages. Working in two languages will allow students to reproduce the linguistic practices of bilinguals. Heritage learners of Spanish should find these practices familiar, and students learning Spanish as a second language will benefit from the scaffolding of using some English. Language development for both profiles of students can be enhanced with the techniques of “intercomprehension”, outlined in the “Guide to intercomprehension” in the resource section in the INDEX.

Instructors can decide what language(s) students should use to participate and respond (Spanish, English, Spanglish), depending on their local context, student level, and course objectives. We have developed these units and resources for teaching this content in regular Spanish language programs, including Spanish as a Heritage Language courses, and any other content course where Spanish is relevant! In fact, the first unit that we developed El corrido “El deportado”, has the purpose of supporting the teaching of Spanish to the understanding of primary texts in a course on History of Latinx in the Americas. This class is taught in our History department; it is not a language class per se, but students have made gains in proficiency by working in two languages. Moreover, content-based materials within a language program or elsewhere on campus become an opportunity for students to engage in debating the relationships between language, ideology, power, and the association of discourse and sociocultural change. Ultimately, this type of curriculum fosters the development of Critical Language Awareness regarding language practices in communities of Spanish speakers, particularly in the US.

One of our main objectives in the Empowering Learners of Spanish project is to provide students with opportunities to participate in current sociopolitical debates. We include several elements already presented in interdisciplinary critical pedagogies of language and discourse. In this manner, this initiative fits within curricular models that integrate language learning with critical studies in culture and discourse. Heritage and L2 students are able to engage with material that emphasizes language variation, social dynamics of language use, and the historical contexts that generate them. This content makes the ELS initiative particularly relevant and motivating to Spanish Heritage learners.

This project has been supported by a generous grant from the College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Oregon.

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Writing Resources That Give Students the Freedom to Explore

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“El aquelarre” by Francisco de Goya is in the Public Domain

When he began compiling his textbook anthology Leyendas y arquetipos del Romanticismo español, Robert Sanders knew that his students weren’t taking upper-level Spanish to become professors of Spanish literature. They were mostly minoring in Spanish with other career goals in mind. This sort of insight into students’ needs is what makes open resources authored by language instructors so valuable for modern education.

Leyendas y arquetipos is an openly-licensed introduction to nineteenth-century Spanish literature for intermediate university students of Spanish. Dr. Sanders chose the works of poetry, drama in verse, and short stories for their literary interest and the social importance of their themes. After piloting the book with students, he compiled vocabulary, historical, and cultural annotations to facilitate comprehension.

Dr. Sanders made many choices in compiling and writing the anthology to allow students the flexibility to pursue their own interests. He did not prioritize any one interpretation of the texts in the anthology. The discussion questions mention scholarly works as a jumping off point for analysis rather than a definitive interpretation. The author biographies in the anthology are short in order to encourage further investigation and richer discussion by students, and the book lists sources for further research, such as Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, the Centro Virtual Cervantes of the Cervantes Institute, or the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the Spanish National Library. In his course, students have  even created their own multimedia take on a chosen work by creating fan fiction, graphic novels, film storyboards, and musical compositions.

The multimedia potential of the book is also reflected in the paintings, photographs from films, and other art that are as valuable as the texts in their potential to teach about literary and social movements of the time. The art provides a whole other avenue of exploration and analysis to students.

Dr. Sanders compiled the book himself with support from the Portland State University Library, which has supported the prolific creation of open textbooks (several of them for languages) in order to save students money and provide a customized learning experience. The book has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which means that anyone can copy it, share it, and make modifications, as long as they give attribution to the author, maintain the same license, and do not make a profit off of it. With this in mind, what could you do with this book? Has it given you ideas about reading with your students? Tell us in the comments.

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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:

Building Community at AATSP

By Carl Blyth

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Conferences are a great place to talk to teachers and hear what’s on their minds.  The Spanish and Portuguese teachers at the AATSP conference in San Antonio gave us lots of terrific ideas. Here are a few:

Ann Mar, a high school AP Spanish teacher from San Antonio, told us that she had recently become aware of COERLL’s SpinTX Video Archive.  She was excited to discover that it  closely aligns with the new AP Spanish curriculum scheduled to begin this fall.  The AP Spanish Language and Culture Course is a national curriculum set by the College Board. Ann told us that there are 6 themes within the new curriculum  that match up well with the themes in the SpinTX videos ( e.g. “Personal and Public Identities”, “Families and Communities”,  “Contemporary Life”).

Ann has already posted a link to SpinTX in the AP teacher community forum. She will also be running a summer institute for AP Spanish teachers at UT Austin later in July. Finally, she is  interested in having her high school students in San Antonio collect videos using our protocols, with the idea that we could use them as part of the corpus if they turn out well.  So, it looks like COERLL will definitely be exploring how to  connect our video archive to the AP Spanish curriculum with Ann’s help.  Thanks, Ann!

Another terrific idea came from  Dr. Margo Milleret from the Portuguese program at the University of New Mexico. Margo suggested that COERLL consider developing badges aimed at middle or high school students based on our introductory LCTL resources. Badges are a way to recognize and verify online learning. The goal would be to expose students to languages that aren’t normally offered in high schools (such as Portuguese), so that when the students go to college, they would be more likely to study a LCTL.  She noted that while she doesn’t have the resources to do something like this herself, she would really like to collaborate with a center like COERLL and other  K-12 teachers to make it happen.  Margo’s great idea combines various elements of COERLL’s mission:  K-12, LCTLs, and Open Education.

And finally, another good idea came from ACTFL president Toni Theisen. Toni was chatting with us at the COERLL booth about the tremendous potential of badges for teacher development.  She wondered whether COERLL could help ACTFL award attendees of this year’s convention in Orlando with a participation badge.  Great idea, Toni! That would certainly help bring badges to the attention of the foreign language teaching community.  Let’s work on this … together.

Open Education is fundamentally about sharing.  So a big “Thank You” to all the teachers who shared their  ideas with us at AATSP.

—

Carl BlythCarl Blyth is Director of COERLL and Associate Professor of French, UT Austin.  His research includes CMC,  cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, and pedagogical grammar.  He is project director of eComma, an open-source annotation application to facilitate more “social” forms of reading.

 

 

Shareworthy: COERLL’s Webinar Series

From the editor

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Your foreign language department will thank you for sharing COERLL’s Webinar Series, all about open educational resources (OER) for language learning. Here’s what we covered:

Finding Open Media for Foreign Language Instruction Learn how to search for and find high-quality authentic OER (multimedia, realia, interviews, etc.) for use in language teaching and learning.

 

The Practice of Using and Teaching with OER Explore the practice of implementing OER into teaching and learn specifically about integration of COERLL’s popular French curriculum, Francais interactif, into foreign language classrooms.

 

Focus on SpinTX: An Open Video Archive for Language Learning We unpack one of our most recent projects, SpinTX–a resource for bilingual Spanish speakers in Texas. Learn how to search and tag videos for features that match your interests, and create and share your favorite playlists.

 

5 Ways to Open Up Corpora for Language Learning

By Rachael Gilg

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Corpora developed by linguists to study languages are a promising source of authentic materials to employ in the development of OER for language learning. Recently, COERLL’s SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom project launched a new open resource that seeks to make it easy to search and adapt materials from a video corpus.

The SpinTX video archive  provides a pedagogically-friendly web interface to search hundreds of videos from the Spanish in Texas Corpus. Each of the videos is accompanied by synchronized closed captions and a transcript that has been annotated with thematic, grammatical, functional and metalinguistic information. Educators using the site can also tag videos for features that match their interests, and share favorite videos in playlists.

A collaboration among educators, professional linguists, and technologists, the SpinTX project leverages different aspects of the “openness” movement including open research, open data, open source software, and open education. It is our hope that by opening up this corpus, and by sharing the strategies and tools we used to develop it, others may be able to replicate and build on our work in other contexts.

So, how do we make a corpus open and beneficial across communities? Here are 5 ways:

1. Create an open and accessible search interface

Minimize barriers to your content. Searching the SpinTX video archive requires no registration, passwords or fees. To maximize accessibility, think about your audience’s context and needs. The SpinTX video archive offers a corpus interface specifically for educators, and plans to to create a different interface for researchers.

2. Use open content licences

Add a Creative Commons license to your corpus materials. The SpinTX video archive uses a CC BY-NC-SA license that requires attribution but allows others to reuse the materials different contexts.

3. Make your data open and share content

Allow others to easily embed or download your content and data. The SpinTX video archive provides social sharing buttons for each video, as well as providing access to the source data (tagged transcripts) through Google Fusion Tables.

4. Embrace open source development

When possible, use and build upon open source tools. The SpinTX project was developed using a combination of open source software (e.g. TreeTagger, Drupal) and open APIs (e.g. YouTube Captioning API). Custom code developed for the project is openly shared through a GitHub repository.

5. Make project documentation open

Make it easy for others to replicate and build on your work. The SpinTX team is publishing its research protocols, development processes and methodologies, and other project documentation on the SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom blog.

Openly sharing language corpora may have wide-ranging benefits for diverse communities of researchers, educators, language learners, and the public interest. The SpinTX team is interested in starting a conversation across these communities. Have you ever used a corpus before? What did you use it for? If you have never used a corpus, how do you find and use authentic videos in the classroom?  How can we make video corpora more accessible and useful for teachers and learners?

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gilgRachael Gilg is the Project Manager and Lead Developer for COERLL’s Spanish in Texas Corpus project and the SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom project. She has acted as project manager, designer, and developer on a diverse set of projects, including educational websites and online courses, video and interactive media, digital archives, and social/community websites.