Foreign Languages & the Literary in the Everyday

Project Directors: Chantelle Warner (UA), Carl Blyth (University of Texas at Austin), Joanna Luks (Cornell University).
In collaboration with: the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) at the University of Texas at Austin.

This project has created an archive of activities in several languages–Arabic, Chinese, German, Portuguese, Turkish, Persian, Spanish—as well as a new online environment that facilitates the creation of user-generated materials that go beyond a single author. It  expands upon COERLL’s French OER Le littéraire dans le quotidien, a textbook with materials that bridge the divide between lower level language courses and upper level literature “content” courses.

The Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday (FLLITE) project  (1) has created an archive of literacy-based materials that implement LITE principles (e.g., the metaphorical extension of meaning in new contexts, an emphasis on language play, the use of social reading and collaborative annotation), to include forum spaces for discussions between members of teaching communities and examples of how to integrate the materials into curricula and classroom practices (these will be updated through crowdsourced ideas found in the discussion forums); (2) has tagged materials with metadata such as topic, linguistic features, and proficiency level so that users can choose the activities that best suit their needs; (3) has expanded the archive to include other LCTLS, for which there are often limited published teaching materials and for which the high costs of traditional textbooks are often prohibitive, and (4) has offered a series of professional development events (in-person and online) that aid educators in using FLLITE materials, and creating similar resources tailored to their own classrooms.

In 2021, the authors published an OER handbook for the FLLITE project, The Literary in the Everyday: A Literacy-based Approach for the Language Classroom.

See resources and events on the FLLITE website, hosted by our partner COERLL.