Actividades de práctica con aprendices del español is an online corpus of videos of second language and heritage language learners of Spanish during oral interviews and provides supplemental activities to help viewers investigate learners’ language and proficiency levels.

Aswaat Arabiyya is an archive of 245 videos in Arabic, listed by difficulty level and accompanied by glossaries and four worksheets each that focus on every aspect of listening comprehension. Selections come largely from Arabic media, with some cultural presentations by native speakers. Videos cover the entire Arabic-speaking world and include MSA and different dialects. Materials are designed to be used both as in-class activities and homework assignments. Videos can be slowed down.

There is great need to understand individuals' functional language abilities, not only in education but in commerce and public policy discussion. The aim is to quantify language use patterns, proficiency, and dominance in the two languages of bilinguals. The Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) is an instrument for assessing language dominance through self-reports that is concise, quick, and easy to use. The BLP is intended to produce a continuous dominance score and a general bilingual profile taking into account a variety of linguistic variables. The BLP is an open and free assessment tool for researchers, educators, and anyone with an interest in assessing language dominance.

Description provided by COERLL:

COERLL hosted an online “OER hangout” on September 25th on the subject of creating open educational resources (OER) with students. With 26 people attending, five language instructors shared their experiences of working with their students to create openly licensed resources for teaching and learning:

Amber Hoye and Kelly Arispe lead the Boise State University Department of World Languages’ Pathways OER Language Teaching Repository of openly licensed proficiency based activities, created by students and teachers.

Kathryn Murphy-Judy, Ngoc-My Guidarelli, and Laura Middlebrooks are part of a team of faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University who have developed an open, connected platform for students to share authentic resources.

At Boise State, upper-level undergraduate students, with the mentorship of staff and faculty, create activities to be used in the weekly language lab component of introductory language courses. These activities can also be used in the classroom and K-12 teachers in Idaho have been involved in creating and teaching with them. At Virginia Commonwealth University, undergraduate students in the 202 class, who are either majors on their way to upper level courses or students finishing their language requirement, curate authentic resources and discuss them with native speakers. Then, upper level students turn those curations into instructional modules, which are being integrated into online open textbooks.

You can learn more about the logistics of these projects by viewing the webinar video, reading about the projects, and perusing the materials. Here, we’ll mention a few of the important themes that came up during the discussion.

One important element of students being involved in materials creation is that they understand what other students will be interested in and can choose topics and texts they know their peers will enjoy. Involving students ensures that a more diverse array of voices and perspectives are represented in the materials, and gives students more of a choice in their own education. Students also gain skills beyond language and culture when they work on these projects: digital citizenship, open license knowledge, technical skills, an understanding of language proficiency, and knowledge of state and national standards.

Each of these projects has a broad community of people with various skills who can support each other and contribute in different ways. At Boise State, the language resource center director, language students and students from other departments, faculty mentors, SLA & CALL researchers, K-12 teachers, state partners, and librarians have all contributed to the OER. At VCU, students, faculty, and librarians contribute to the materials and partnerships are developing with K-12 teachers who use the materials in their courses.

Each of these projects follows an iterative process of development. The work doesn’t start and finish in the span of a semester, it grows and changes. Students develop materials, native speakers proofread them, teachers teach with them, and the team refines them. The Pathways Project carries a disclaimer that “The activities on the Pathways Project OER Repository were created by upper-division students at Boise State University and serve as a foundation that our community of practice can build upon and refine. While they are polished, we welcome and encourage collaboration from language instructors to help modify grammar, syntax, and content where needed.” The cycle of the projects is such that lower-level students can get involved in the project as learners, but go on to take a more active role in the project as they progress.

The panelists recommend to anyone interested in creating OER with their students that they start small, and reach out to available communities (institution-wide, or online professional networks) for support and sharing. On that note, COERLL’s next OER hangout is on the topic of joining a teacher community. Join us on November 13th!

View the webinar video, links to the repositories, slides from the presenters, and more on the event page of COERLL’s website.

Chansons françaises is the integrated music component of Français interactif. Chansons features a French or Francophone song, related to each chapter's cultural or pedagogical focus, presented via audio or video. Accompanying pdfs provide additional information, as well as comprehension exercises. Songs act as a portal to various Francophone cultures and musical genres. Aural comprehension and study of lyrics afford students practice with culturally authentic text and expression. Students discover yet another reason to be passionate about studying French!

This podcast series consists of simple dialogue exchanges. The listening materials are suitable for beginners and help them take the first step toward becoming proficient listeners. The contents of these 72 dialogues are completely based on the beginning level Chinese curriculum; they are creative yet realistic scenarios on topics that listeners can relate to, such as the social, family and school aspects of one’s life. Full transcripts transcripts in both traditional and simplified characters as well as English translations are provided as downloadable PDF documents. The podcast format enables a generation of increasingly ‘mobile’ learners to study the material ‘on-the-go’.

Practice vocabulary on the go! The original idea conceived by a fellow Chinese language student, this flashcard exercise is an engaging and effective way to review vocabulary terms from the convenience of your mobile device.

A collection of video lessons on grammar topics for beginning Mandarin Chinese, available as a YouTube playlist.

Chinese Take-In provides an interactive environment where first-year Chinese learners can practice listening outside the classroom according to individual needs and paces while receiving immediate feedback.

Created by student request, this set of basic word-order exercises will help beginners practice the foundational skills of how to use the language in the right order.

Chqe’tamaj le qach’ab’al K’iche’! seeks to develop a beginner to advanced level online course for K’iche’, a Mayan language of Guatemala. The team includes faculty and grad students at The University of Texas at Austin and at Vanderbildt University, as well as associates in Nahualá who are all working together to develop materials relevant for the course.

This will be the first full online course of any Mayan language. Based on the variety spoken in Nahualá, it seeks to develop oral fluency in the student in addition to an understanding of the grammar as well as reading skills. The intended audience for this pedagogical resource is foreign students interested in developing their language skills, as well as native teachers in bilingual schools through western Guatemala.

The Portuguese language lessons of ClicaBrasil highlight aspects of Brazilian culture. They are designed for intermediate to advanced students, but are accessible to everyone. Each lesson includes videos of Brazilians from all walks of life speaking naturally about their lives and their country. All lessons integrate reading, writing, listening and comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, oral communication and cultural activities with the videos. This is also available as a free PDF textbook and as print on demand.

ClicaBrasil was developed for intermediate level Portuguese language courses at UT-Austin. People all ove the world are now using it for different purposes: self-study, classroom instruction, tutoring, or as a pastime.The lessons in ClicaBrasil integrate reading, writing, listening and reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, oral communication, and cultural activities. Numerous video clips (157, to be precise!) that show different Brazilians speaking about their lives, their culture, and their country support and enhance these activities.

A compilation of video scenarios of people interacting with each other in Portuguese. Conversations include dialogs, questions, turn taking exchanges, clarifications, false starts, hugs, laughter, asides. The scenarios are enhanced by transcriptions, translations, content analysis, and notes and discussion blogs.

DSOKids is the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's magical doorway to a world of musical fun and learning for students, parents and teachers. The site's mission is to provide attractive, accessible and child-friendly resources that introduce symphonic music, the orchestra and its instruments, and to encourage both adults and young people to explore the world of the symphony orchestra.

This textbook includes all 10 chapters of Deutsch im Blick (2nd ed, 2017). Deutsch im Blick is the web-based first-year German program developed and in use at the University of Texas. It is an open access site with free and open multimedia resources, which requires neither password nor fees.

Enhancing French skills is a website for intermediate learners of French. It includes authentic language videos from French websites, as well as interviews of French speakers on cultural topics. Videos and activities are organized into five broad themes and tagged by communicative language function with links into Tex’s French Grammar for specific grammar explanations and interactive exercises. Each theme includes a pdf of suggested classroom activities and homework.

An online, video-based methods course focusing on best practices for foreign language instruction at the high-school and college levels. It features 12 interactive media-rich modules taught by different professors from the University of Texas at Austin. Modules include Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Vocabulary, Grammar, Pragmatics, Culture, The Language Learner, Technology, Classroom Management, and Assessment.

The FLLITE website contains a collection of lessons in second language literacy for various languages.

The website is the focal point of the FLLITE Project, which takes the creative moments found in everyday language use as the basis for lessons in second language literacy. By emphasizing language play as central to communication, FLLITE lessons aim to develop language awareness as well as communicative abilities through the integration of speaking, reading, listening, and writing tasks.

The goal of the FLLITE Project is the publication of classroom-tested lessons based on authentic texts in different languages, for example, blogs, Internet memes, YouTube videos, slam poetry, and so forth.

All FLLITE lessons carry an open license that allows you the teacher to…

…access, adapt, and re-use any lesson; and
…contribute a lesson for editorial feedback and publication.

Français interactif is a unique, award-winning 1st-year French curriculum used by learners all over the world. Students explore French language and culture by following the lives of real students who have participated in the UT Summer Program in Lyon, France. The online curriculum includes over 320 videos, vocabulary and phonetics audio, online grammar reference with self-correcting exercises and audio dialogues, verb conjugation and practice tools, internet activities, and a textbook of classroom exercises. Franais interactif was awarded the 2009 CALICO Esperanto Access to Language Education Award and the National Endowment for the Humanities EDSITEment Best of Humanities on the Web award (2005)

This site offers a collection of free interactive language learning resources for beginning Mandarin Chinese. Students now have the option to practice pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, listening, and reading skills at their own convenience.

Gateway to Chinese resources are designed to give students the valuable feedback they need to improve language skills in the critical early stages of learning. An extensive number of interactive exercises allow students to practice what they learn. With these tools, instructors can utilize valuable classroom time to do what they do best: teach!

The German Frame-semantic Online Lexicon (G-FOL) is a prototype of a new kind of pedagogical dictionary. The goal is to help students learn how words are used in modern-day German. This online resource is different from traditional dictionaries and textbooks because it is based on the German FrameNet at the University of Texas at Austin, a digital archive of how German words are used in real life contexts. As such, students can easily access up-to-date information about the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic contexts in which a German word appears. In addition, each lexical entry provides information about a word’s register, frequency, and related meanings. Thanks to G-FOL’s web-based architecture, the lexicon easily links to other pedagogical resources in digital format and can be updated with new words or new usages of existing words.

Grimm Grammar is an online German grammar reference from the University of Texas at Austin. It is an irreverent revival and shameless exploitation of 19th-century Grimm Fairy Tales for honorable pedagogical purposes.

An online German grammar reference, featuring zany post-modern Grimm's fairy tale characters, authoritative grammar explanations, self-correcting exercises, online audio and cartoon images.

If you have found yourself searching for, adapting or creating materials for your heritage classes because of a lack of readily available commercial resources, this site is for you!

The growing body of online educational resources is helping to create universal access to language education. This is a good thing. Use this introductory guide to find open resources for your classroom. The OER ecosystem works best when everybody contributes content. Consider sharing your own. Educators often supplement foreign language textbooks. Perhaps your students need more grammar, authentic L2 materials, or listening practice exercises. Go to an open content search page. For example, Creative Commons offers a system of open licensing which enables resource sharing. Their CC search page is a great place to start. However, finding openly licensed educational resources (OER) - which can be edited, built upon, and shared without copyright restrictions - isn't always easy.

Free practice modules for Spanish language educators
Introduction to Oral Proficiency Levels is a free open educational resource that can help Spanish teachers gain a foundational understanding of how to evaluate Spanish speakers. The resource includes 17 video-based practice modules designed to strengthen your understanding of the ACTFL Speaking Proficiency Guidelines and to help you evaluate the speaking levels of your language students.

Le Littéraire dans le quotidien is an open textbook for use in French courses. The Literary in the Everyday represents a new pedagogical approach to reading and writing at the lower levels and is applicable to all languages. Teachers of foreign languages besides French can read about the approach in the Teacher's Guide. Go to Google Drive for individual chapters. Additionally, the Foreign Languages & The Literary in the Everyday (FLLITE) Project, a joint initiative of COERLL and CERCLL, two national foreign language resource centers, offers open resources for professional development in the publication of CC licensed FLLITE lessons in any language. Go to the FLLITE website for the lesson archive.

Les Conversations Mises à Jour is a collection of authentic conversations in French that targets mostly intermediate and advanced learners of French. Each conversation highlights the shared experience of two native or near-native French speakers and provides both an oral history of that experience and a trove of cultural references.

¡Listos! is a series of units for Heritage Spanish learners in grades 6-12. Three lessons aligned to the K12 Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) form four thematic clusters. Relevant scenarios related to personal life, college tasks, career readiness and civic participation frame each lesson and increase student engagement by making learning authentic and relevant to real issues that students face. Each lesson identifies an intermediate or advanced proficiency target that supports language acquisition in the interpersonal, interpretive and presentational modes. The project also provides teachers with a replicable approach to lesson design for adapting or creating their own materials.

In Brazil, the term língua da gente (literally ‘language of the people’) refers to the way that people actually talk in everyday speech. And that, in essence, is the object behind this series. We hope to provide practical lessons that demonstrate how people really speak, and we do this by presenting brief, slice-of-life dialogs, which focus on some daily situation, scenario, or task that we encounter every day.

Each audio podcast, generally between 8-12 minutes, includes the presentation of a brief dialog, a line-by-line English translation, and more in-depth analysis of the pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural content in the lesson. Discussion blogs also accompany each lesson, providing community interaction for comments and questions. In broad terms, the lessons are subdivided into three levels of difficulty: Beginning, Elementary, and Intermediate. Additionally we have a cultural show that covers current events and related social issues.

This self-paced course is based on the Nahuatl variant from the Huasteca of Veracruz that is spoken in Chicontepec, Veracruz, Mexico. The principal aim of this course is to develop the student’s oral, written, and comprehension abilities primarily through the study of grammar, listening, and reading. The intended audience for this pedagogical resource is foreign students interested in developing their language skills, as well as native teachers in bilingual schools in the Chicontepec region.

An Interactive Course on Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation.
Pitch Perfect Pinyin is a two-part interactive website for learning Pinyin pronunciation.

A compilation of nearly 350 brief video clips, together with a complete Portuguese transcription and English translation of native speakers of Portuguese from various locations throughout Brazil (and some Portugal) who talk about 80 different topics.

Selection of aural Italian grammar lessons (podcasts). Grammar examples and dialogs are built upon the escapades of Arlecchino, Pulcinella, and other masks of the Italian Commedia dell'arte. Lessons feature topical grammar discussions, dramatic readings, pdf grammar notes ... and general audio zaniness.

Reality Czech is an openly licensed online curriculum for beginning to intermediate-level Czech students. The course aims to be a highly communicative introduction to Czech language and culture and includes over 240 interview compilation videos shot in the style of a reality TV show on a variety of everyday topics such as daily schedule, hobbies, food and drink, studies, holidays, health, weather, and more.

The name Reality Czech reflects not only the centrality of these interviews to the curriculum, but also the textbook’s focus on the vocabulary and constructions Czechs frequently use to talk about everyday topics. The entire course has been shaped by the language used in the interview videos as well as openly licensed content sourced from the internet.

Each of the 10 units follows a sequence of pre-class, in-class, and post-class activities ideal for a flipped classroom:

- Pre-class activities such as Quizlet vocabulary activities, video and audio with comprehension questions, culture notes, and grammar exercises introduce students to new language.
- An activity book for in-class use provides all of the resources an instructor needs to create a communicative classroom experience focused around task-based learning, such as games and activities.
- Post-class activities use both exercises and authentic multimedia texts as a catalyst for students to create language.

The materials all exist natively online in flexible formats such as Google Docs, and are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, allowing the curriculum to be easily adapted to 100% online delivery.

COERLL has partnered with Rose Potter and Betsy Arnold to publish Recorridos-Don Quijote, a pair of openly-licensed books for the study of Cervantes’ Don Quijote in upper level Spanish courses, including AP. The student workbook, accessible online for free, deepens students’ understanding of the text through reading, pre-reading, and post-reading activities and glosses. The companion teacher support facilitates the teaching of Don Quijote through student-centered strategies and activities, historical and cultural information, quizzes, exams and more.

Rockin Russian is designed to give students exposure to the Russian language and culture through the medium of Russian music videos. Students are able to perfect their grammar while rocking out to music videos from Russia's pop stars. Based on Russian music videos from MTV Russia, Rockin' Russian is supplemented with exercise materials focusing on pronunciation, vocabulary development, grammar and cultural features. Parts of the videos are embedded into exercises in each category that students can revisit, strengthening their language skills.

These videos from COERLL's annual Heritage Spanish workshop address different topics in heritage teaching such as:

- Heritage language program development
- Open educational resources for heritage Spanish
- Basic sociolinguistic concepts for the Heritage Spanish classroom
- Spanish HL Learning and Teaching

A compilation of brief video clips in which native speakers of Spanish from various locations throughout Latin America and Spain demonstrate various language tasks.