11 | I have been developing OER materials grounded in the multiliteracies pedagogy Learning by Design (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015; Kalantzis et al. 2005, 2016) for the teaching of Spanish as a second (L2) and heritage (HL) language since 2016. At present, I am writing an OER L2 Spanish textbook (titled "Trayectos") with a graduate student, Alessandra Ribota, and a team of seven undergraduate students at my institution, Texas A&M University. As a L2 researcher, I also examine OER-related instructional issues such as 1) the identification of students’ needs (considering personal and institutional expectations and outcomes); 2) the development of curricula (the determination of thematic and linguistic content); 3) the search for, selection of, and development of appropriate resources; and 4) the training and coordination of materials development teams. In addition, I investigate institutional and pedagogical aspects of OER materials implementation process, and the effect of this type of resources on the development of Spanish as a HL learners' literacy and L2 students' competence in the three modes of communication, interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational. My involvement with open-source instructional resources also extends to the incorporation of web-based applications to L2 instruction. For example, at present, and in collaboration with Texas A&M graduate student Maybel Mesa Morales, I am investigating the pedagogical benefits of the use of eComma for the comprehension and interpretation of authentic, open-source multimodal texts in intermediate L2 Spanish university classes. This is a case study that focuses on L2 Spanish students' collaborative work on the online, synchronous analysis of literary pieces connected to the themes of the class’s instructional units throughout a semester. |
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