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.

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.

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.