Foreign Languages and Literatures
On this page you will find several openly licensed Foreign Language and Literature textbooks along with supplemental material, interactive simulations, and other resources.
Discipline-specific pages are not intended to be exhaustive, but to showcase content that may be of interest to faculty considering adopting open educational resources for use in their classes.
For more information about Creative Commons including license descriptions, please see the Creative Commons tab.
Featured Resources
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Introduction to OER for foreign language teachersAn open course provided by COERLL
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Voices for Openness in Language LearningMeet faculty who teach a variety of languages and have benefited from and contributed to foreign language OER.
Open Textbooks
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Deutsch im BlockDeutsch 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. Deutsch im Blick has a companion grammar reference site: Grimm Grammar http://coerll.utexas.edu/gg
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Francais interactifA 13- chapter French textbook.
Activities
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El español en los Estados UnidosSupplementary materials for students in beginning Spanish that focus on issues of cultural identity of Spanish speakers in the United States. Includes glossed readings, extensive multimedia content and flash-based comprehension questions.
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AccesoA media-rich curriculum for intermediate Spanish that answers the MLA's call for the development of "transcultural and translingual competence" and serves as a platform for collaboration among instructors learning about technology. Winner of the 2012 Focus Award from the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO).
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French à la modeActivities for French learners at the beginning and intermediate levels that are intended to be used in conjunction with any curriculum. The interactive nature of many of the activities also make the site suitable for independent study or practice.
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Между нами: An Interactive Introduction to RussianA complete web-based curriculum for introductory Russian. Winner of the 2016 Access to Language Education award from the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium and the 2017 Best Contribution to Language Pedagogy award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. Introduced in Fall of 2015, the curriculum has been adopted by twenty universities (http://www.mezhdunami.org/instructors/adoptees.shtml) for Fall 2017.
Finding more resources
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Finding openly licensed foreign language resourcesInfographic from the Center for Open Educational Resources and language Learning, University of Texas at Austin
Course materials: Lecture Videos, Interactive Simulations etc.
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Language Learning MaterialsA growing collection of language learning materials covering: Portuguese, German, French, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Italian, Russian, Yoruba, Biblical Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, Malayalam, and more.
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OER Commons - ArabicFree to use, openly licensed resources from K-12 to college. Featuring islamic studies, art, poetry, music, literature, history, and Arabic language.
(Arabic Interface) https://arabic.oercommons.org/AR
See also
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Additional openly licensed resources for language teaching & learningOver 100 openly licensed "World Languages" resources are available in MERLOT II. See a list of these resources by language.
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OER for Less Commonly Taught LanguagesCollaborative projects with National Resource Centers for the development and dissemination of OER designed to advance the instruction of less commonly taught languages using technology-enhanced settings such as video conferencing and mobile learning.