2 Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics
Basic Hindi I
Author: Rajiv Ranjan
Description: Basic Hindi I is an online, interactive, theme-based textbook for the true beginner of Hindi language. It promotes communicative, linguistic, and cultural competence. It has mixture of pedagogical approaches to fit all types of learning and teaching philosophies/styles to achieve intermediate low to mid ACTFL proficiency level within a semester.
License: CC-BY
Bate-Papo: Introduction to Portuguese
Author: Eduardo Viana da Silva
Description: This book was developed having in mind university students who speak English as their first language. We also took into consideration speakers of Spanish by highlighting some key similarities and differences between the two languages. Although this material was developed for university students, we hope that most of its content is also applicable to high school students, adolescents, and adults learning Portuguese, including immigrants in Brazil. The main focus of this edition is on Brazilian Portuguese. Occasionally, we highlight main differences between Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese spoken in Africa and Asia, and European Portuguese.
This e-book emphasizes meaningful communicative activities for a classroom setting, focusing on everyday language in Brazilian Portuguese. Some of the book content derived from unrehearsed conversations following a prompt (greeting each other, for example) . Bate-Papo focuses on interactive activities, for a grammar reference, we linked parts of the text to the open e-book Português para Principiantes, hosted by PressBooks at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We also incorporated pod-casts from another open education resource, Língua da Gente, developed by Orlando Kelm from the University of Texas, at Austin. Bate-Papo has been developed with the collaboration of volunteers and has been written with the goal of facilitating the teaching of Portuguese without the cost of traditional textbooks.
License: CC-BY
Beginning Japanese for Professionals: Book 1
Author: Emiko Konomi
Description: For more accessible and classroom-friendly (Word and PDF) versions of this book, please view and download them at PDXScholar. This Pressbooks version primarily exists to encourage others to adapt and adopt Beginning Japanese for Professionals using Pressbooks. This textbook is designed for beginning learners who want to learn basic Japanese for the purpose of living and working in Japan. Corresponding audio files are available for free online.
License: CC-BY-NC
Beginning Japanese for Professionals: Book 2
Author: Emiko Konomi
Description: For more accessible and classroom-friendly (Word and PDF) versions of this book, please view and download them at PDXScholar. This Pressbook version primarily exists to encourage others to adapt and adopt Beginning Japanese for Professionals using Pressbooks.
This textbook is designed for beginning learners who want to learn basic Japanese for the purpose of living and working in Japan. Corresponding audio files are available for free online via PDXScholar and PSU Media Space.
License: CC-BY-NC
Daily Departures: Speed Reading Passages for English Language Learners
Author: Regina D. Weaver
Description: For more accessible and classroom-friendly (Word and PDF) versions of this book, please view and download them at PDXScholar. This Pressbook version primarily exists to encourage others to adapt and adopt Daily Departures: Speed Reading Passages for English Language Learners using Pressbooks.
This textbook is designed to provide fluency support for English language learners at the Waystage level of the Common European Framework Reference.
License: CC-BY
A Digital Workbook for Beginning ESOL
Authors: Eric Dodson, Davida Jordan, and Timothy Krause
Description: This book contains three levels of interactive grammar lessons and reading activities for beginning students of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages). The grammar section includes a select set of YouTube videos, and the three original readers include short picture or chapter stories. Each lesson is accompanied by self-correcting exercises.
License: CC-BY
Elementary Arabic
Authors: Ayman Mohamed and Sadam Issa
Description: This is an open textbook on Elementary Arabic for undergraduate students who are taking Arabic in their second semester. It addresses language structures in theme-based modules that cover the four language skills. The book can be used as a self-study resource or as the main textbook in beginning Arabic classes.
License: CC-BY
English Literature II
Author: Whitney Nelson, Bunker Hill Community College
Description: English Literature: Victorians and Moderns is an anthology with a difference. In addition to providing annotated teaching editions of many of the most frequently-taught classics of Victorian and Modern poetry, fiction and drama, it also provides a series of guided research casebooks which make available numerous published essays from open access books and journals, as well as several reprinted critical essays from established learned journals such as English Studies in Canada and the Aldous Huxley Annual with the permission of the authors and editors. Designed to supplement the annotated complete texts of three famous short novels: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, each casebook offers cross-disciplinary guided research topics which will encourage majors in fields other than English to undertake topics in diverse areas, including History, Economics, Anthropology, Political Science, Biology, and Psychology. Selections have also been included to encourage topical, thematic, and generic cross-referencing. Students will also be exposed to a wide-range of approaches, including new-critical, psychoanalytic, historical, and feminist.
License: CC-BY
Essentials of Linguistics
This peer-reviewed open textbook covers the core areas of theoretical linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics), supplemented with discussion of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic findings.
Includes: videos, interactive assessments.
License: CC-BY-SA
A Foundation Course in Reading German
A textbook published by University of Wisconsin-Madison and went through many versions over the years, it is designed to guide a learner who has no previous German experience to gain the ability to accurately understand formal written German prose, aided only by a comprehensive dictionary.
License: CC-BY-NC-SA
From MSA to CA: A Beginner’s Guide for Transitioning into Colloquial Arabic
Author: Lina Gomaa
Description: This Pressbooks version exists to encourage others to adapt and adopt From MSA to CA: A Beginner’s Guide for Transitioning into Colloquial Arabic. For more accessible and classroom-friendly (Word and PDF) versions of this book, please view and download them at PDXScholar. PLEASE NOTE: This Pressbooks version includes sentence structure errors in tables because both English and Arabic are used in the same sentences, and this content cannot be correctly interpreted by your web browser. Any table reuse needs to be done from the Word or PDF versions.
License: CC-BY-NC
German Frame-semantic Online Lexicon
This open German-English vocabulary resource applies the linguistic theory of Frame Semantics to the language classroom in an effort to teach the meanings of vocabulary items and how to use them appropriately.
Includes: videos, activities.
License: CC-BY
Green Tea Intermediate English Communication OER
Authors: Eric Dodson, Luciana Diniz, and Nanci Leiton
Description: This set of multimedia materials incorporates interesting topics and real-world language in an accessible way for adult English language learners at the low-to-mid intermediate level, using eclectic methods (communicative activities, content-based instruction lite, focus on form), all while maintaining a connection to our learners’ lives.
License: CC-BY
Hola a Todos: Elementary Spanish I
A textbook for introductory Spanish, created by faculty at University of North Georgia.
Includes: activities, exercises.
License: CC-BY
How Language Works (Gasser)
This LibreTexts looks at a range of introductory topics and themes related to linguistics, the science of language. It examines some of the biases we all have concerning language and uses this as a base for its exploration.
Includes: exercises, instructor and student resources.
License: GNU General Public License 3.0
Integrated and Open Interpreter Education
Authors: Elisa Maroney, Amanda Smith, Sarah Hewlett, Erin Trine, and Vicki Darden
Description: 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.
License: CC-BY-NC
JUNTXS: Introductory Spanish
Author: Adriana Diaz
Description: JUNTXS is an open access educational resource which can be used in conjunction with a variety of approaches to support beginning learners of Spanish. This media-rich learning resource is designed to guide learners in their Spanish language learning journey through a critical and intercultural lens and to provide regular opportunities to explore, practise and improve their ability to read, speak, and understand this language as it is used across the Spanish-speaking world.
License: CC-BY-NC-SA
The Languages of Berkeley: An Online Exhibition
Author: Claude H. Potts, curator
Description: This online library exhibition celebrates the magnificent diversity of languages that advance research, teaching, and learning at the University of California, Berkeley. Taking place between February 2019 and October 2020, it was the point of embarkation for an exciting sequential exhibit that built on one post per week, showcasing an array of digitized works in the original language chosen by those who work with these languages on a daily basis — librarians, professors, lecturers, staff, and students.
License: CC-BY-NC
Let’s Read French Books
Authors: Somayeh Kamranian, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Jean Giono
Description: Reading books is a great way to learn a language. It helps to discover the culture, to learn new words, to be exposed to different language structures in the context. But, one of the biggest challenges in the language and literature classes is to encourage the students to read. This project aims to make reading literary books easier for the students by creating an open textbook reader using Public Domain 19th century French literature. Along with the text, there are activities for students to engage with and discover the text.
License: CC-BY-NC-SA
Libro Libre: Beginning Spanish
A textbook for introductory Spanish that has been positively-reviewed.
Includes: activities, exercises.
License: CC-BY-NC-SA
Mythology Unbound: An Online Textbook for Classical Mythology
This mythology text has been positively-reviewed and has been successfully adopted by other faculty. It covers introductory concepts in classical mythology, from Apollo to Zeus.
Includes: instructor resources, student resources, applications, summaries, exercises, solutions, and group activities.
License: CC-BY-NC-SA
Novels for the End of a World
Author: Nathan Richardson
Description: Novels for the End of a World is an introduction to the twenty-first century novel as written and published across the Spanish-speaking world. It’s also an argument for reading narrative fiction from Spain and Latin America as a single entity. Where once we analyzed literature within narrow national traditions, today’s best-seller lists, literary prize money, and even the tales themselves point to the need for more holistic approaches. So too the themes they explore. Today’s writers and readers inhabit a global world where our sense of space and time shrinks at exponential rates. At the same time so much of daily experience continues to be lived locally and, as always, with often overwhelming affect. Given that, it shouldn´t surprise us to find common threads and themes running across narrative fiction from Madrid to Mexico, from Argentina to Asturias, and yet to find at each stop these themes registered through intensely and intimately local stories. In this way, Novels for the End of a World becomes at once an overview of major trends in narrative across the Spanish-speaking world and a trip through the rich, wide variety of local life. Arising out of this literary adventure is one thread common to all: that beyond the end is a barely distinguishable glimmer of light, a sign of new ways for a new world.
License: CC-BY-NC-ND
Para vivir con salud
Authors: Kathryn Joy McKnight y Jill Kuhnheim
Description: We have developed this open access book for universities and colleges responding to the needs and interests of students preparing for careers in health or even seeking to add a “health track” to their majors or minors. Para vivir offers an introduction to reading different literary and cultural texts from the Spanish-speaking world with a thematic focus on health. It can be used as an alternative to the standard Introduction to Hispanic Literature course that teaches students techniques of close reading. It incorporates authors from seventeen counties, has an almost even representation of male and female authors and diverse communities in the Hispanic world (European, Creole, Afro Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Jewish). In addition to introductions to reading different genres (narrative, poetry, theater, and film) we have scaffolded supporting material such as biographies, notes on the historical contexts, pre and post-reading questions.
While we have included primary source material when possible, due to copyright restrictions we have not been able to include some of the contemporary texts/sources. In these cases we encourage instructors to look for these online (when possible, we have indicated where they might be available) or to supplement this webbook with a packet or materials on your learning support system (such as Blackboard or Canvas). Instructors can also select which chapters to include in a class and may do so in terms of what is available at their libraries.
The book begins with presentations of genres in the first section. The second section opens with a chapter about the health humanities, followed by texts and films that are connected thematically. You might choose to set up your syllabus along these same lines, including all or some of the material; another possibility would be to organize the readings by genre or region or to group them historically and refer to the genre information as it is pertinent. While all the texts can be linked in some ways to health and illness, it is important to not only think of these thematically but to consistently examine how our different frames of reference provided by our disciplinary trainings may encourage us to read in a particular way. For example, medical histories or charts are also genres that structure and limit what physicians record and, perhaps, what they see.
In the subtitle, “leyendo la salud y la literatura,” we invite students to think about lived experience as a text that needs deciphering, just as do written or performed texts. Health, healing, illness, and death—all concepts and practices related to health—are formed within language and culture. Their meanings are not transparent. We believe that learning to read texts closely also helps us to read and interpret more effectively the spoken word, the words of patients and neighbors and loved-ones, and the health-related practices in which we all engage.
By centering on the practice of reading, the importance of how language is used and the silences that subtend someone’s experiences of their bodies we may “learn to be affected by literature,” and to ask “what is this work forcing me to notice?”.[1] In her study on how we read, Louise Rosenblatt contrasts “efferent” with “aesthetic” readings. These are terms that she defines with regard to focus. An aesthetic reading concentrates on the quality and the structure of what happens during the reading event. An efferent reading centers on what will remain after reading: the information, solution, or application of ideas.[2] Students who are interested in the medical fields bring tools from their own experiences and perspectives; perhaps adding epidemiological concepts such as the “counterfactual” to the discussion of a story by Cortázar or their knowledge of cultural, spiritual, or non-Western approaches to representations of health or the end of life. Incorporating diverse perspectives will increase mutual understanding in diverse cultural settings, times, and disciplines. Our pre and post-reading exercises are designed to help students think through issues and ideas raised by the works and these may also be supplemented by reflective analytic exercises or affective responses that take into account the interplay between these different perspectives.
License: CC-BY-NC
Paris à travers les pages
Author:
Contributors: Elizabeth Templeman, Casey Montgomery, Camille Warner, Annabelle Gaardsmoe, Sephora Delice, Rachel Legow, Patrick Sockler, Lucie Hopkins, and Eunice Umubyeyi
Description: Paris Through the Pages is the culminating project for an advanced level undergraduate French course that explores the images of Paris in literary works from the 17th to 20th centuries. As an open source book, it is intended to be re-used, revised, and repurposed by undergraduate students and academics in French studies. The students who participated in this project spent a semester reading works by French authors from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, integrating them within their historical and cultural contexts. Given that the majority of the semester was spent introducing students to these authors and works, the students could only spend the final few weeks refining their research on a particular author and creating a chapter in groups that represented the literary images of Paris from a particular era. Although the students wrote and revised several versions of their individual articles, they have established a foundation of research for other classes and students to explore, expand, and revise themselves. The hope is to create a book that other French classes—at Muhlenberg and elsewhere—can build from and expand the thematic approach and literary perspectives.
License: CC-BY-NC
Pour une linguistique du développement
Author: Léonie Métangmo-Tatou
Description: Le développement des sociétés africaines n’est-il qu’une question économique? La linguistique est-elle condamnée à n’être qu’une science positiviste qui observe sans s’impliquer? Ce livre offre de riches perspectives à ceux et celles qui répondent non à ces deux questions. Il montre qu’il est possible de faire place, dans les sciences du langage, à des préoccupations citoyennes orientées vers la correction d’une précarité communicationnelle nuisible à l’épanouissement des sociétés africaines. Ce que l’autrice propose de nommer « linguistique du développement » peut, par exemple, aider l’agronome intervenant dans le monde paysan à adopter la langue la plus appropriée. Des travaux linguistiques de codification ou de traduction peuvent contribuer à préserver et valoriser des savoirs locaux d’une pertinence sociale attestée. Les linguistes peuvent aussi mettre au jour les ressorts langagiers des pratiques corruptives. Il s’agit là de quelques-uns des chantiers de la linguistique du développement, nouveau paradigme des sciences du langage au service du bien commun, qui trouve dans ce livre ses fondements théoriques et éthiques.
License: CC-BY-SA
The Roman Empire
This roman empire text has been positively-reviewed and has been successfully adopted by other faculty. It covers introductory concepts in the roman empire.
Includes: instructor resources, student resources, applications, summaries, exercises, solutions, and group activities.
License: CC-BY-ND
Roman Gods
This peer-reviewed Roman text has been successfully adopted by other faculty. Drawing exclusively on the evidence from urban Rome up to the age of Constantine, the book analyzes the pagan, Jewish, and Christian concepts of “god” along the lines of space, time, personnel, function, iconography and ritual.
Includes: instructor resources, student resources, applications, summaries, exercises, solutions, and group activities.
License: CC-BY-NC
Spunti: Italiano elementare 1
Authors: Daniel Leisawitz and Daniela Viale
Description: Together, this pressbook, the in-class material and the practice exercises can replace a traditional textbook and workbook. Our approach to language instruction is interactive, conversational and fundamentally task-based. We see grammar as a means for enabling effective communication, which is why our explanations of grammar are concise and not overly technical.
After years of teaching Italian, we had become frustrated by two aspects of available textbooks. First, their exorbitant cost, which presents students with a significant financial burden. Second, the limitations textbooks necessarily impose on our courses’ structure and approach to learning.
There is no lack of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in Italian; quite the contrary. One can find a jungle of disparate materials of varied quality, which are hard to locate and synthesize into a coherent course. This is why we created Spunti: a free, coherent, agile, functional, and culturally rich course for Muhlenberg students, and hopefully for students elsewhere, as well.
The Spunti pressbook is a work in progress, and we would greatly appreciate any feedback, suggestions, and adaptations that anyone can give us. Our hope for Spunti is that it can benefit from the input of Italian instructors and students from around the world.
This project would not be possible without the generous support of Muhlenberg College and our colleagues: Dr. Lora Taub-Pervizpour, Dean for Digital Learning; Dr. Kathy Harring, Provost of Muhlenberg College; and Dr. Eileen McEwan, chair of the Languages, Literatures & Cultures Department.
License: CC-BY-NC-SA
Spunti: Italiano elementare 2
Authors: Daniel Leisawitz & Daniela Viale
Description: Welcome to Spunti: Italiano elementare 2 – a new, unique program, authored by the Italian faculty of Muhlenberg College, that takes the place of a traditional language textbook. Spunti is a fully designed course that a college instructor of Italian can use and adapt. It consists of:
- this OER pressbook;
- printable material for in-class use (available soon on this site);
- practice exercises on our Canvas site (available only to Muhlenberg students)*;
- complete semester lesson plans (instructors can inquire about purchasing).
Together, this pressbook, the in-class material and the practice exercises can replace a traditional textbook and workbook. Our approach to language instruction is interactive, conversational and fundamentally task-based. We see grammar as a means for enabling effective communication, which is why our explanations of grammar are concise and not overly technical.
License: CC-BY-NC-SA
Teaching Math for Emergent Bilinguals: Building on Culture, Language, and Identity
Authors: Ji-Yeong I and Ricardo Martinez
Description: This book is designed for pre-service/in-service teachers and others who will work or work with K–12 students who have linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds, especially students of other languages (English language learners/Emergent bilingual/multilingual).
License: CC-BY-NC-SA
Technical Writing @ SLCC
Authors: Department of English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies at SLCC
Description: This textbook is for use in the English 2100 Technical Writing courses at Salt Lake Community College. It contains reading materials that the Technical Writing Committee of the English department have deemed important for students of ENGL 2100 to learn.
It is also prepared for use by the tutors of the Student Writing and Reading Center at SLCC.
Finally we also present this book to everyone at SLCC and the general public as a resource for technical writing.
License: CC-BY-NC
Western Civilization
This peer-reviewed, open lumen learning course covers introductory concepts in western civilization, from the Hittites to the Protestant Reformation.
Includes: instructor resources, student resources, applications, summaries, exercises, solutions, and group activities.
License: CC-BY-SA