Group items tagged

Official webpage of the AIM Commission: "The Advisory Commission on Accessible Instructional Materials in Postsecondary Education for Students with Disabilities, established by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, will study the current state of accessible materials for students with disabilities in postsecondary education and make recommendations to the U.S. Congress for improving access to and the distribution of instructional materials in accessible formats. This is the first commission in history charged with examining accessible instructional materials for postsecondary students with disabilities."

"This platform is aimed at supporting university educators and mobility coordinators to organise and run online intercultural exchanges for their students. In these exchanges, students from universities in different countries collaborate together using online communication tools to carry out collaborative projects and to learn about each other's language and culture. By taking part in such projects, students can develop foreign language skills, intercultural awareness, electronic literacies as well as learning more about their particular subject area. If you are a teacher working at a university in Europe or elsewhere, this platform will help you to find partner teachers and classes in other countries, to read about tasks, successful projects and evaluation tools and to exchange questions and experiences with an experienced community of practitioners."

"This article aims to provide novice IME users with an introduction to some of the intermediate and advanced features literally waiting at their fingertips, providing a basis for improved typing efficiency, problem solving and expanded usage."

American Association of Teachers of Arabic (AATA) aims to facilitate communication and cooperation between teachers of Arabic and to promote study, criticism, research and instruction in the field of Arabic language pedagogy, Arabic linguistics and Arabic literature.

The conference aims to bring researchers and practitioners across languages, levels and settings to discuss and share research, theory, and best practices and foster meaningful professional dialogue on issues related to Intercultural Competence teaching and learning.

The GLoCALL Conference aims to share knowledge, research and experience on how to use computer technology to make language learning more effective and pleasant; to explore how the technology can be adapted to better meet the local needs of students and teachers, while at the same time providing global perspectives on computer-assisted language learning (CALL); and to bring the technology within the reach of local teachers who wish to develop their professionalism in CALL. GLoCALL is jointly sponsored by APACALL and PacCALL.

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn. All lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available in video, audio, and text transcript format. Registration is not required and no course credit is available.

Free lesson plans, homework help and professional development for teachers, students and parents. This site is a search portal for materials collected/developed by 9 major educational organizations (National Council of Teachers of English, American Library Association, etc.) Although it seems primarily aimed at lower-ed educators, the search function does have a category for "higher ed" materials. There is also a parallel site in Spanish, which might be useful for beginning-level Spanish learners.

"CorpusLAB is a new FREE site for language learners and language teachers. CorpusLAB is designed to promote language learning based on real English used in different settings. Students can use the site to take a variety of exercises created by teachers. Go to the Student pages and select a topic area (phrasal verbs, Academic English etc.). If you register, you will be able to keep track of your progress. Teachers can use the site in different ways. The central engine of the site is a series of exercise authoring tools. The exercises, which include fill-the-gap, multiple-choice, matching, reorder, and categorise, are designed in a way that promotes the learning of collocations and phrasal patterns. For example, the matching exercise allows up to five columns of items rather than the usual two. One of the aims of the site is to build up resources for specialised English: Medical English, English for Tourism, and so on. "

Our long term goal is to promote research relating to the acquisition of French as a second/foreign language, by providing access to a growing database of French Learner Language Oral Corpora. The contents of the database are being made freely available to the research community, in the form of digital sound files and related transcripts formatted using CHILDES software. A search facility is also provided which enables researchers to select the sound files and transcripts they wish to download from the site. The database currently contains over 4000 files (sound files, transcripts and morphosyntactically tagged transcripts). The website also aims to include an inventory of other French interlanguage corpora not available within FLLOC but held by other researchers and institutions.

We are inviting contributions to an edited book, to be published by a major international publisher, on the topic of language learning and teaching beyond the classroom. The aim of the book is to provide an account of the range of settings and types of learning and teaching beyond the classroom and to develop a broad theoretical understanding of this area of research and practice.

The Spanish FrameNet Project is creating an online lexical resource for Spanish, based on frame semantics and supported by corpus evidence. The "starter lexicon" is available to the public, and contains more than 1,000 lexical items (verbs, predicative nouns, and adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and entities) representative of a wide range of semantic domains. The aim is to document the range of semantic and syntactic combinatory possibilities (valences) of each word in each of its senses, through: * human approved and automatic annotated example sentences and * automatic capture and organization of the annotation results. The Spanish FrameNet database will be in a platform-independent format, and it is able to be displayed and queried via the web and other interfaces.

The Generation 1.5 project was launched in 2006 by a small group of researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) English Language Institute (ELI). We are collecting texts from writers who are just starting their academic careers at the university, specifically 1st and 2nd year undergraduates, who speak a variety of Korean or Chinese at home. Ultimately, the aim of this data collection is to provide an empirical basis for developing recommendations for writing/language instruction specialized for the Generation 1.5 group.

Ukelele aims to simplify keyboard layout editing by providing a graphical interface to .keylayout files, where the desired characters can simply be dragged onto keys as needed. (The Character Palette or Character Viewer, available in the Input menu if it has been enabled in System Preferences, is a great place to find the characters.) In addition to simple assignment of single character codes to keys, Ukelele can assign multiple-character strings and can create "dead keys", where a keystroke sets a new state that modifies the output of the following keystroke. For more information about Mac OS X keyboard layouts, as well as existing layouts available for download, see Input Resources. For some types of layout, particularly with large numbers of dead-key sequences, creating a layout with the text-based tool KeyLayoutMaker may be a useful alternative.

"Does listening to something, perhaps once, perhaps more than once, perhaps over and over again, mean that it is learned in a way that is useful to the student and that they can retrieve and re-use in an appropriate context at a later date? It is a proposition that seems to conflict with the situated learning theories of researchers like Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989), which assert that learning always lies in the interactions between people rather than in the content itself or in the minds of the individual learners. The general premise that listening is often more engaging than the written word and that diction, intonation and inflection add meaning might be acceptable at face value, but as Hargis and Wilson (2005: 6) point out, 'there are currently no examples which clearly indicate proven foundational pedagogical uses and outcomes for podcasts.'. Though the technology is quite recent, it may tend to lead teachers towards outmoded, didactic approaches to delivery rather than the constructivist, collaborative activities recommended by more recent learning theorists."