This presentation will introduce the SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom project, a collaborative effort among foreign language educators, linguists, and technologists at COERLL and the University of Texas at Austin. The goal of the project is to leverage open video corpora and linguistic data for the development of Open Educational Resources (OER) for language learning. The presentation will discuss the project?s main results to date: (1) a pedagogically-friendly web interface to search a collection of transcribed and annotated video clips from the Spanish in Texas Corpus; (2) tools and templates facilitating the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER) using the corpus; (3) an open source model for developing and adapting video corpora for pedagogical use.
The first result of the project is the launch of the SpinTX video archive, a pedagogically-friendly web interface to an open Spanish language video corpus. The archive currently contains hundreds of openly-licensed videos and transcripts from the Spanish in Texas Corpus, a collection of interviews with Spanish speakers living in Texas. These videos provide authentic samples of the Spanish language that American students are likely to encounter in their everyday lives, thus making them useful as authentic oral texts for the teaching of foreign languages. Each of the videos is accompanied by a complete transcript that has been annotated with thematic, grammatical, functional and metalinguistic information as well as synchronized closed captions. Using SpinTX, educators are able to search and tag the videos for features that match their interests, and share favorite videos in playlists.
The second result is a set of online templates and models for creating Open Educational Resources (OER) using video from the corpus. The presenters will describe the collaboration with educators to develop methodologies for the creation of activities and lessons using authentic video. Moreover, they will describe how educators are reusing and remixing OER developed using the SPinTX materials.
The final result of the project is the development of tools and methodologies for researchers and educators interested in creating or adapting their own video corpora for language learning. The presenters will demonstrate how it is possible to use a combination of open source software and open APIs and to construct a linguistically-annotated video corpus suitable for pedagogical applications. Documentation of development processes and custom open source code is provided through the project development blog and code repository.
Project Links: Spanish in Texas: http://www.spanishintexas.org SpinTX Video Archive: http://www.spintx.org COERLL (Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning) http://coerll.utexas.edu
