Open Educational Resources for Foreign Languages

One of the most important things we can do to hold ourselves accountable for our learning is to engage in goal setting and metacognition—a fancy term for thinking about the way we think and learn. The goals we set should be specific and achievable. Something like “Speak Spanish” is too broad, we need to focus on the steps we need to take to get there and the signs that we will see as proof of our progress.

An Open Textbook as created by the UNG Elementary Spanish I grant team. Grammar and vocabulary pre-class activities, lectures, and post-class homework are included within its seven chapters.

Media-rich and interactive, this resource is driven by video that was shot on-site in Guadalajara, Mexico. This course is available for low-cost use by instructor-led classes of enrolled students, and can be adapted for a hybrid delivery system or solely distance delivery. Please note: the Open & Free version of Spanish I contains just a sample of the content, and not the full course.

“Students will learn vocabulary related to greetings and farewells, courtesy expressions, college courses, professions, family relationships, pastimes, city places, numbers, days of the week, months and how to tell time. Students learn grammatical structures that support sentence formation, such as nouns and articles; descriptive and possessive adjectives; the present tense of ser, estar, tener, venir, ir, ver and oír; the present tense of regular –ar, –er and –ir verbs; stem changing verbs (e-ie, e-i and o-ue); verbs with irregular yo forms (hacer, poner, salir, suponer and traer); and question formation.”

“An open curriculum for beginning second language learners of Spanish. This is a beta version, part of a two-volume program that is still being developed by Dr. Gabriela C. Zapata and a team of graduate and undergraduate students at Texas A&M university, with the support of COERLL. Trayectos features a learner-centered, multimodal approach grounded in the Multiliteracies pedagogy Learning by Design(Kalantzis et al., 2005; 2016).”(from https://coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/spanish)