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!
Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar is a multimedia textbook with supplementary materials for intermediate Turkish language learners.
The textbook and public Canvas course comprise an openly licensed curriculum focused on developing Intercultural Communicative Competence. The four units invite learners to engage with culturally rich print, audio and video texts and use the target language to investigate, explain and reflect on the relationship between contemporary Turks’ socio-cultural practices, products and perspectives. Each unit addresses a different aspect of society: family, love and marriage, the environment, and art and politics, and contains the following components:
- contextualized grammar lessons,
- videos of Turks speaking about their lives and their country,
- activities that hone language skills while raising awareness about contemporary Turkish society,
- interactive, auto-correct exercises that facilitate learners’ acquisition of vocabulary and syntax structures.
The Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar textbook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. It is now downloadable for free in PDF or adaptable Google Docs format and is also available for purchase as a print-on-demand book from Lulu.com and Amazon.com. The Canvas course will be launching later in Spring 2021.
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—isnʼt 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.
The purpose of these materials is to help future public school teachers of Spanish in their assessment of learners' levels of proficiency. These materials not only present videos of learners interacting with an interlocutor, but also direct the viewer to notice features about the learners' language and proficiency levels. The website also presents information on proficiency levels to help the viewer develop a greater awareness of differences in learner language.