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.
8 Fun Games and Activities to Teach Young Children a Foreign Language! This video is sponsored by WordUnited.com, who make the most beautiful write-and-wipe ...
Julio Noboa is a poet, author, and former professor of social studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Throughout his work and career, Dr. Noboa is known for advocating for better representation of Latin American history in U.S. social studies classes. In the next poem, a speaker describes flowers and weeds.
Read the poem aloud and take notes on how the speaker views flowers and weeds.
This Open Educational Resource (OER) on interpreting offers authors and readers free and open access to current, relevant, easy-to-access, and free materials. The editors have created a space where emerging scholars in the field of signed language interpreting make contributions with the ability to revise as the interpreting studies discipline and the scholars,themselves, develop and change. This OER provides faculty and students readings and practical application experiences that connect program specific coursework and concepts across the interpreter education curriculum emphasizing the holistic nature of the field of interpreting.
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.
This is a study at the AP level of Spanish on the Guerra Sucia of Argentina. Although the instructions are in English, all work would be done in the target language.
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.
The main goals of the unit are to develop basic knowledge about insects and to develop the language linked with the theme. Most of the lessons promote the use of cooperative learning strategies and the use of graphic organizers.
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.
Attention high school Spanish teachers! This is a Webquest that I created to be used as a group project in a High School Spanish I class. It is a cultural learning project spanning three weeks for classroom groups composed of four students. Within each group, each student will carry out one of four different roles/tasks in preparation for an imaginary trip that the class is going to make to Mexico and Central America. Each group will have the option of choosing to research one of the seven countries included, which can accommodate a classroom of up to 28 students under the parameters given. The nice thing about this project is that each group will give a presentation on a different country which will broaden the students' cultural knowledge of Mexico and Central America. This project is intended for high school Spanish students but could also be used for middle school. The only technology needed is a computer, projector, and an internet connection. ¡Que lo disfruten!
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.
Students take a walk on the wild side when they research an animal and create a scavenger hunt activity for their classmates.
An Interactive Course on Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation.
Pitch Perfect Pinyin is a two-part interactive website for learning Pinyin pronunciation.
This seminar addresses the inherent challenges of translating poetry from different languages, cultures and eras. Students do some translation of their own, though accommodations are made if a student lacks even a basic knowledge of any foreign language.