Libraries Learning Commons: Open Educational Resources (OER): English Language Studies

Recommended Open Educational Resources

Frameworks for Academic Writing

This book was designed for a wide range of writing abilities. Writers who are simply unfamiliar with academic writing patterns benefit from sentence-by-sentence templates, prompts, tutorials, and examples.

A Digital Workbook for Beginning ESOL

A Digital Workbook for Beginning ESOL is digital content created for beginning and intermediate students learning English as a second language.

Communication Beginnings: An Introductory Listening and Speaking Text for English Language Learners

Designed for beginning-intermediate English language learners. Chapters cover speaking and listening learning objectives and includes dialogues, interviews, discussions and conversation activities.

In the Community: An Intermediate Integrated Skills Textbook

Textbook to help ESL students acquire communication skills in the community (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). The book is aimed at Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) levels 5/6.

About Writing: A Guide

This writer’s reference condenses and covers everything a beginning writing student needs to successfully compose college-level work, including the basics of composition, grammar, and research.

Choose one:

Always follow the terms of use/Creative Commons licence requirements associated with a work.

How to create a Creative Commons attribution.

Language Studies OER: General Repositories

BASE: Language Resources
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 150 million documents from more than 7,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
The Mason OER Metafinder
The Mason OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials.
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)--Humanities Collection
Free and open collection of peer-reviewed online learning materials for higher education.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Courses and assessments from MIT OCW.
Open Library
One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal. To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.
To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way. This source is particularly strong in humanities subjects.
Milne Open Textbooks (formerly OpenSUNY): Textbooks
Growing collection of open access textbooks.
Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.
Project Gutenberg--Language and Literature Bookshelf
Collection of public domain classic language and literature eBooks.

Language Studies OER: Textbooks

Searches:

Examples:

College ESL Writers: Applied Grammar and Composing Strategies for Success
This book is designed as a comprehensive grammar and writing etext for high intermediate and advanced level non-native speakers of English.
Communication Beginnings: An Introductory Listening and Speaking Text for English Language Learners
This textbook is designed for beginning-intermediate English language learners. It is composed of 7 chapters, each of which covers specific speaking and listening learning objectives and includes dialogues, interviews, discussions and conversation activities.
In the Workplace: An Intermediate Integrated Skills Textbook
This is an English-language skills textbook to help ESL students acquire communication skills in the community (listening, speaking, reading, and writing).
Writing for Success
This text provides instruction in steps, builds writing, reading, and critical thinking, and combines comprehensive grammar review with an introduction to paragraph writing and composition.
Oral Communication for Non-Native Speakers of English
This textbook includes materials on listening, speaking, lexicogrammar, pragmatics, and pronunciation.

Language Studies OER: Modules, Simulations, Lesson Plans, etc.

Searches:

Examples:

American English Speech (Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative)
An OER course that focuses on pronunciation rather than grammar or vocabulary. CC Noncommercial Share Alike license.
ESL Through Music
Free lesson plans that incorporate music in ESOL classroom activities.
GCFLearnFree: Learn English
Goodwill Community Foundation - online learning portal for computer skills, reading and math. Tutorial instructions in Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, and simple English.
Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab
Audio listening quizzes, vocabulary lessons, and exemplar conversations.
TESL Handouts for Classroom Use
Lots of free ESOL classroom activities (some for kids, some for adults).

Grammar Bytes
A website with modules, worksheets, quizzes, exercises, videos and more.
Mobile ESL - Athabasca University
This is a course of lessons and practice on the system of English. It is divided into eighty-six sections. Each section covers an area of basic grammar and contains a number of exercises.
Niagara College Centre for Academic Excellence: Work-Integrated Learning Modules
These modules are grounded in The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario’s (HEQCO) A Practical Guide for Work Integrated Learning and represent over 35 hours of rich content that can be used by faculty, career-services staff, and employers to support student learning in applied and work-integrated settings. The modules, licensed under the Creative Commons (CC BY NC 4.0), may be packaged together to create an online course, substantial units of a course, or to supplement WIL experiences within other courses.
more...less...
Topics include:
-Job Search Skills
-Interview Skills
-Professional Expectations and Competencies
-Interpersonal Expectations and Competencies
-Research and Business Communication Skills
-Your Professional Future