Open Educational Resources and Practices for Language Vitality: the Case of Latgalian
(Latvia)Sanita Lazdiņa, Ilga Šuplinska
Rēzekne Academy of Technologies (Latvia)
Conference Open Education: promoting diversity for European languages
26 – 27 September 2016, Brussels
Overview
1. Latgalian: a Short Background2. Language Vitality and New Domains and Media3. OER and Learning to Apply New Digital Tools: A Few
Examples4. From Language Practices towards Policies
1 Latgalian: a Short Background Census 2011:
• Language used as dominant home language in Latvia:• 62% Latvian (including Latgalian)• 37% Russian
• 8.8% of the population (165,000 individuals) of Latvia report that they use Latgalian on an everyday basis
• Latgale: 35.5% use Latgalian regularly
Latgalian - vulnerableUNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/index.php
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/language-vitality/
OER and Learning to Apply New Digital Tools: A Few Examples
• Creating a video: learning about history from individual stories of children and older people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9PFeDc7_cg)
• Creating subtitles (educational materials in more than one language) http://amara.org/lv/videos/bA4zlEWzBzC3/info/consumer-and-producer-surplus-ar-lv-subtitriem/
OER and Learning to Apply New Digital Tools
• Changing roles: pupils as teachers of digital competence• Interdisciplinarity (diverse contents in different
languages)• Changing perspectives: lesser-used languages in an
attractive frame• Learning to share (for free!)
How do language practices at schools reflect official and non-official language policies?
• Language practices at schools depend on and reflect local actors (municipal authorities, schools, regional universities, etc.)
• Official educational frameworks (curricular planning, languages of instruction) reflect the role of the state language.
• At the same time, educational institutions are much more flexible than other official domains to react to the ethnodemografic composition of the population
• Language practices at schools also reflect debates among educators and researchers: how to move forward from monolingual towards multilingual habits in education (from One language-only language policy at schools into Translanguaging (Adamson & Fujimoto-Adamson, 2012)).
