LLAS News Blog

News articles of interest to higher education LLAS subject fields.

Thursday 4 October 2012

New open resources published as part of FAVOR project


The LLAS-led FAVOR project is drawing to a close this month and is celebrating the publication of over 340 new open educational resources for language teaching and transition on www.languagebox.ac.uk

The JISC-funded project worked with part-time and hourly-paid language tutors to get them to publish a selection of their teaching resources as open, adaptable content. It also got them to create *NEW* resources to help explain and describe how languages are taught at HE, and give prospective students a ‘taste of’ language-learning at university.

There were about 25 tutors working on the project and materials cover at least 17 different languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Slovak, Latvian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Arabic, Swahili, Tigrinyan, Amharic, Finnish, Hungarian.

• Check out the online activities shared by University of Southampton tutors: Katy Heady for German and Bianca Belgiorno for Italian.

• Admire the beautiful kanga fabrics and proverbs for Swahili shared by Wambui from the School of Oriental and African Studies

• Study the examples of effective student feedback from Richard Galletly at Aston University

• Get into learning Finnish from Riitta-Liisa Valijarvi at UCL – I’ve already wiled away an enjoyable half hour on the loanwords quiz!

• Admire these beautiful and fascinating pictures of a Chinese market in Beijing from Dan Li at Newcastle University – they make me want to fill my house with giant calligraphy brushes and statues! Or learn some a Chinese song from Linda Cheng, also at Newcastle.

Tutors report that they have really enjoyed creating resources and making them available to the world. They will continue with open practice in their work and if you are keen to find out more, the project blog is at: www.thefavorproject.wordpress.com

There are still new FAVOR resources appearing on LanguageBox every day and all of them give a fascinating taste of language study in Higher Education. Have a browse and see what grabs your interest…

Kate Borthwick
Academic Coordinator, LLAS

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