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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Inspiring case studies of open practices to engage teachers and students

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Editor’s note: the below post is the forward by Carl S. Blyth, COERLL director, to the recently published book New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, edited by Anna Comas-Quinn, Ana Beaven, Barbara Sawhill. The forward carries a CC BY license.  

Today, in the field of foreign language teaching, there is much talk of shifting paradigms. The term paradigm was popularized by the American physicist Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, scientific progress is neither linear nor continuous, but rather subject to abrupt shifts in the consensus of a scientific community. To illustrate this phenomenon, Kuhn cites the well-known shift in astronomy from geocentrism (the belief that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth) to heliocentrism (the belief that the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun). Kuhn stresses that paradigms are defined by contrasting concepts and discourses and, as a result, are largely incommensurable. Kuhn also notes that paradigm shifts are not only a matter of accepting new facts, but of reorganizing those facts into a new worldview. In other words, paradigm shifts entail objective as well as subjective change.

Despite examples of revolutionary change in the sciences, paradigm shifts in the humanities – such as in foreign language education – appear to be more gradual. Most foreign language educators integrate new ideas into their curricular and pedagogical practices in an incremental process of professional development. Personally, I believe that paradigm change in foreign language teaching is largely a matter of educators learning by example from each other. Simply put, there is nothing more powerful than a case study for catalyzing change in our field. And in this book, New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, foreign language specialists share their stories of personal and professional transformation in the well-known form of a case study. Following the same format, each case study provides the reader with the necessary information to understand and to implement a specific pedagogical or curricular innovation. For example, each case study includes a detailed description of a new project, the intended student outcomes, as well as the tools and resources used in the project.

While many case studies focus on the use of ready-made Open Educational Resources (OERs), others describe how to integrate Open Educational Practices (OEPs) into foreign language classes. Several case studies explain how to implement principles of open pedagogy such as the creation of a Wikipedia page or a translation of a TED Talk by the students themselves. In such cases, students are challenged to follow the editorial guidelines of Wikipedia and TED for the creation of open content. Thus, in the open language classroom, students share their knowledge with the world while, at the same time, improving their proficiency in the target language. In short, each case study described in this book is a beautiful illustration of the creative commons in action. I sincerely hope that foreign language educators who read these case studies will embrace the affordances of openness for themselves and their students and thereby shift the paradigm one classroom at a time.

For an open world.

Remix TED Resources to Teach English Around the World

By Ana Beaven

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A few days ago a friend of mine who also teaches in Italy asked me whether I could help her look for materials she could share with the foreign language teachers at the school. They wanted to remix the materials and turn them into Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) resources.

As a teacher of English as a foreign language to university students majoring in a variety of subjects, I find TED Talks extremely useful to provide authentic listening on a variety of topics ranging from technology, entertainment and design to economics, biology and the role of women in the world, to mention but a few. Now TED offers these other sites:

  • TEDyouth  Videos from the TEDyouth conferences could certainly be used with secondary school pupils.
  • TEDx  The advent of TEDx — independently organised TED-like events in the whole world — has also extended the languages of the talks beyond English. This is good news for teachers of other languages.
  • TED-Ed  A different but related source of materials that we looked at are the lessons included in the TED-Ed website. These are OER which are designed to teach a variety of subjects. Most are more suitable to secondary than tertiary education and, although they are not designed to teach English as a foreign language, they could easily be transformed into resources for CLIL). In any case, the exceptional opportunity provided within the website – “flipping” the lesson, in other words, adapting it to a different context – makes such adaptations to the foreign language classroom particularly easy to share. A key element in this is, of course, the Creative Commons Licence of the resources.

Here’s one TED-Ed lesson that my friend particularly liked: “How folding paper can get you to the Moon.”

Not only is this an intriguing math story, and a stimulating way to introduce the concept of exponential growth, but in terms of  language teaching, it offers authentic examples of  conditional sentences. The fact that the author, Adrian Paenza, is not a native English speaker makes this lesson particularly appropriate.

My friend and I welcome your help in recommending other open educational resources which are appropriate for CLIL, especially in languages other than English. Thanks!

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Ana1Ana Beaven is a teacher of English as a foreign language at CILTA, the University of Bologna language Centre. In 2012 she organised the Eurocall CMC & Teacher Education SIGs Annual Workshop on the subject of “Learning through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open Communication.”