This blog will chronicle the development of the SPinTX Corpus, and our work to bring a pedagogically useful corpus of authentic Spanish and bilingual Spanish-English speech samples into language classrooms across Texas. The Spanish in Texas (SPinTX) Project project was selected to receive funding from the Longhorn Innovation Fund for Technology (LIFT) for the grant period September 1, 2012 – August 31, 2013. Development of the Corpus began in 2010 and is ongoing under the auspices of the Title VI Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL).

The focus of the project over the next year will be to help educators exploit the SPinTX corpus to customize materials for the teaching of Spanish at all educational levels. The aims of the project are:

• to develop a pedagogically friendly interface for the corpus;
• to involve teachers and learners, via crowd-sourcing, social networking, and workshops, in the development of open educational resources (OER); and to
• develop a model for using open source tools and a pedagogical interface that can be adapted for any language corpus.

In the spirit of openness, we will be sharing and discussing what we learn and create throughout the project. We invite you to join with us as we explore new tools and methods for integrating authentic content and open data into the language classroom!