Group items tagged

Welcome to the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon, CAPL, the source for authentic images for language learning. As a language teacher and learner, I always seek to connect language, culture, and meaning. This site represents my interest to not only write about language learning, but provide concrete examples. Our world rich in diversity, both linguistic and visual, and often the connection between word and image can be lost. As commercial globalization brings the world together through 'common products', we sometimes forget how our visual perception of the world affects our use of words and the meanings they convey. Is a house really a Haus, is pain really хлеб, and when we see red cabbage, is it really red? These are simple and mundane questions that underscore the fact that visual perception is culturally determined and visual cognition varies from culture to culture. The CAPL project seeks to explore this idea through a collection of authentic photographs arranged by language and context. In the coming year, we will add more photos, more databases, and more textual descriptions. Check back often as we expand our collection. It is our hope that the collection itself can spur research in a variety of areas and that the collection can be used by language teachers and learners throughout the world with its generous Creative Commons license.

the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL, pronounced "able") is a membership organization for the world e-portfolio community that now has established affiliations and collaborations with nearly all world-wide portfolio initiatives, projects and organizations. Members and affiliates help continue the work of educational transformation by focusing on new designs in learning and assessment, on increasing connections among the portfolio community, and on moving toward a more authentic assessment of actual student achievement and progress based on evidence of learning over time.

"Actu études & Points de vue: Retrouvez l'ensemble des notes d'analyse et des résultats d'études publiés sur le site tns-sofres.com." Site from a marketing/public opinion firm in France. Has articles with data about the attitudes/points of view of the French public. Interesting authentic text for student reading practice with cultural implications.

"With ThingLink's easy-to-use editor, teachers can create immersive and engaging experiences by adding tags to any image in a few minutes: Create authentic, valuable, and rich interactive stories around historical events using media (video, sound, photos, written words, etc.) found online. Annotate graphs and timelines. Record an instructional message to students inside an image. Embed interactive images into student blogs. Enable students to curate content inside an image to demonstrate understanding of a topic."

This site hosts oral history vignettes, 30 second to 3 minutes long with accompanying transcriptions. Currently there are 8. A few have simple exercises. We will be adding new anecdotes every week from the 500 oral histories I have collected over the past 15 years from Spanish America and Spain. Some are almost entirely in the present tense, some in past, some mixed. There is a particularly cute one about the term of endearment "gordito." Suggestions, collaboration welcome.

Throughout our years of language teaching, we experienced the all-too-common frustration of constantly searching for THE textbook suited to our French language classes and never finding one. What we needed was a textbook teaching beginners or near-beginners how to live in French in the Canadian context. We could not find it, so we wrote it. Teaching how to live in French in the Canadian context means being able to interact with Francophones in a way similar to how Francophones interact among themselves. This implies knowing the rules of communication, being familiar with French-Canadian culture, using real language, and being actively involved in one's learning. À bon port can best be described by these key-words: communication, Canadian, authentic, learner-centered.

"GLOSS online language lessons are developed for independent learners to provide them with the learning/teaching tools for improving their foreign language skills. Reading and listening lessons are based on authentic materials (articles, TV reports, radio broadcasts, etc.) and consist of 4 to 6 activities. The motivating tasks are accompanied with in-depth feedback that provide learners with thorough explanations and tutoring just like an attentive and experienced teacher would do. With more than 5,600 instructional hours of materials, GLOSS is a valuable resource in maintaining and improving language ability of the learners."