During my intermediate Spanish class last Friday we got through the material somewhat faster than I was anticipating.  We were going back over the subjunctive and its different uses (our textbook discusses 6).  Anyway, we were finished with the material with about 15 minutes left to go from our 2-hour class so I had to think fast.  I told my students to go to SpinTX and look up two real-life uses of the subjunctive that illustrate two of the six different uses of the subjunctive that we had discussed, and that they could leave as soon as their group showed me their examples and told me which functions they illustrated.  Needless to say my students jumped right in!  While I watched them work I was very pleased to see them having good discussions about how the subjunctive was being used on the site.  They had absolutely no difficulty in using the site, and each of their identified uses were spot on.  The first group finished after about eight minutes and the last group was almost finished when class officially ended.  I felt that this was a very successful activity at exposing them to the subjunctive and they were happy to have the chance to leave early, so it was a nice win-win.  I will very probably do this again if I’m ever stuck with 15 or so minutes left at the end of a class.

Here is an activity that I have prepared to use with my students with SpinTX to help them review the subjunctive before their final exam this semester.  I will try to remember to update this post with the results of this activity after I use it.

I have used the SpinTX pedagogical video archive in my intermediate Spanish class three times so far this semester and I thought that I’d share a little about what I did and how it worked out.

The first time we were talking about stereotypes in class.  I selected a video ahead of time that I felt was applicable (clip from the interview with Nancy T.)  and then showed it to my students twice in class.  The first time they watched it without captions and the second time they watched it with captions.  I had them listen for all of the stereotypes mentioned in the video.  They seemed very interested in watching the video and we had a good discussion afterwards.

The next time we used SpinTX the class was divided into groups and each group had to look for a video that illustrated real use of adjectives that change meaning depending whether they are preceded by ser or estar, which we had just covered in class.  Then they had to explain why ser or estar was used with each example that they found.  Every group was able to find something to share within 5 minutes; sharing took another 5 minutes.  They really seemed to like the fact that they were looking at real-life examples.

The third time I had my students search for and explain examples of the pluperfect and the present perfect on SpinTX.  These aren’t tagged yet so I had them search for había/habías/habían/habíamos or he/has/ha/hemos/han respectively and then skim the results for hits.  They had about 10 minutes to find and explain two examples of each compound tense.  These are not the most exciting verb tenses, so up to that point that day class had been pretty lethargic.  But their interest was obviously piqued as they searched SpinTX for the examples, and there was even sporadic laughter as they came accross certain examples.  They worked in groups of 4 and wrote down their sentences and explanations on pieces of paper that they turned in after finishing.  I was impressed with how well they were able to apply what we had covered in class that day to recognize and explain correctly examples of the pluperfect and present perfect so quickly!

One final anecdote.  At one point during one of these activities one of my students noticed that the speaker was using “educado” to mean “educated” rather than “mannered”.  She pointed this out and we had a very good, brief discussion about how there is a “standard” Spanish that we teach in class and many different dialects that vary from this standard in different ways.  The entire class was very interested, I think especially since it was one of their own who had noticed the discrepancy.

As these anecdotes illustrate the use of SpinTX in my intermediate Spanish class has been very easy and successful so far this semester!  I have already planned several more activities involving SpinTX throughout the remainder of the semester.

Corpora developed by linguists to study languages are a promising source of authentic materials to employ in the development of OER for language learning. Recently, COERLL’s SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom project launched a new open resource that seeks to make it easy to search and adapt materials from a video corpus.

The SpinTX video archive  provides a pedagogically-friendly web interface to search hundreds of videos from the Spanish in Texas Corpus. Each of the videos is accompanied by synchronized closed captions and a transcript that has been annotated with thematic, grammatical, functional and metalinguistic information. Educators using the site can also tag videos for features that match their interests, and share favorite videos in playlists.

A collaboration among educators, professional linguists, and technologists, the SpinTX project leverages different aspects of the “openness” movement includingopen research, open data, open source software, and open education. It is our hope that by opening up this corpus, and by sharing the strategies and tools we used to develop it, others may be able to replicate and build on our work in other contexts.

So, how do we make a corpus open and beneficial across communities? Here are 5 ways:

1. Create an open and accessible search interface

Minimize barriers to your content. Searching the SpinTX video archive requires no registration, passwords or fees. To maximize accessibility, think about your audience’s context and needs. The SpinTX video archive offers a corpus interface specifically for educators, and plans to to create a different interface for researchers.

2. Use open content licences

Add a Creative Commons license to your corpus materials. The SpinTX video archive uses a CC BY-NC-SA license that requires attribution but allows others to reuse the materials different contexts.

3. Make your data open and share content

Allow others to easily embed or download your content and data. The SpinTX video archive provides social sharing buttons for each video, as well as providing access to the source data (tagged transcripts) through Google Fusion Tables.

4. Embrace open source development

When possible, use and build upon open source tools. The SpinTX project was developed using a combination of open source software (e.g. TreeTagger,Drupal) and open APIs (e.g. YouTube Captioning API). Custom code developed for the project is openly shared through a GitHub repository.

5. Make project documentation open

Make it easy for others to replicate and build on your work. The SpinTX team is publishing its research protocols, development processes and methodologies, and other project documentation on the SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom blog.

Openly sharing language corpora may have wide-ranging benefits for diverse communities of researchers, educators, language learners, and the public interest. The SpinTX team is interested in starting a conversation across these communities. Have you ever used a corpus before? What did you use it for? If you have never used a corpus, how do you find and use authentic videos in the classroom?  How can we make video corpora more accessible and useful for teachers and learners?