UCLA’s Language Material’s Project

Posted by Todd Bryant in General | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

UCLA announced the publishing of the “Language Material’s Project”.  It’s a very well organized database of resources for language teachers of less commonly taught languages.

http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Lessons.aspx?menu=003

These searchable repositories aren’t as necessary as they once were with the rise of very large, public and international web 2.0 sites of links, pictures, news, video, etc.  These crowdsourced sites tend to be much larger than academic repositories and are easily searchable by language via tags.  For example, one can search Flickr or YouTube by keyword in a given language and find thousands of videos.

That being said, I think this project has some strengths that will appeal to language teachers.  The organization by material type and language makes it easy to find quality resources on the topics common to beginning and intermediate texts.  For Arabic they’ve also categorized the items by country of as standard Arabic.

If you’re looking for something specific, you’re probably still better off going to a more general site for authentic materials.  On the other hand, if you’re starting your syllabus for next semester, it’s well worth the time to peruse the materials they’ve collected in the language.  Odds are quite good you’ll find something (menu, brochure, simple online game) that can add to a class activity.

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