9 Modern Languages and Literatures
Modern Languages (LLM)
No suggested OER at this time.
World Literatures and Cultures (LCM)
No suggested OER at this time.
Arabic Language and Culture (ARB)
Elementary Arabic
Ayman Mohamed and Sadam Issa (Michigan State University)
2020
Licence: CC BY 4.0
This open textbook is intended for beginning students of Arabic who have already covered their literacy skills and ready to explore language in a lively and interactive approach. This OER is unique in its presentation of Arabic language content through theme-based modules. Each theme is addressed through vocabulary, grammar, reading, speaking, culture, and writing components. Each chapter includes self-check embedded quizzes that help learners digest language concepts. The book is also designed with teachers in mind. Each chapter includes pair work and group tasks that the teacher can implement in class and other parts that can be assigned as homework. The focus of the book is to establish a sound basis in Standard Arabic structure in a simplified and sequenced approach. Additionally, each theme will include a conversation section in which a module on Egyptian Arabic is presented. While developing a solid foundation in written Arabic, the Egyptian Arabic component will enhance students’ spoken fluency and enrich their cultural experience in their language learning journey.
Format: Pressbooks WebBook
Includes: Activities, audio files, review questions, and worksheets
Suggested for:
ARB 1912 Elementary Arabic II
FROM MSA to CA: A Beginner’s Guide to Transitioning to Colloquial Arabic
Lina Gomaa (Portland State University)
2015
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
This book is for students who have studied Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for one year or more and would like to learn colloquial Arabic basics using their knowledge of MSA. It aims at transitioning learners from Novice Mid level to Intermediate Low through presenting situations useful for living in an Arab country. The book has several features including hyperlinks, practice dialogues with open answers, cultural tips, and more.
Format: PDF and online
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
ARB 3911 Advanced Arabic I
ARB 3912 Advanced Arabic II
ARB 4911 Advanced Arabic III
ARB 4912 Advanced Arabic IV
Asian Studies (ASI)
No suggested OER at this time.
Celtic Studies (CLT)
No suggested OER at this time.
Chinese (CHN)
No suggested OER at this time.
German Language and Culture (ALG)
A Foundation Course in Reading German∗
Alan Ng and Sarah Korpi (University of Wisconsin)
Last updated: November 2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
A textbook published by University of Wisconsin-Madison and went through many versions over the years, it is designed to guide a learner who has no previous German experience to gain the ability to accurately understand formal written German prose, aided only by a comprehensive dictionary.
Formats: Online and PDF
Includes: Objectives, exercises, and answer keys
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
ALG 1901 Elementary German I [as reference only]
ALG 1902 Elementary German II [as reference only]
ALG 2901 Intermediate German I
ALG 2902 Intermediate German II
ALG 3901 Advanced German I
ALG 3902 Advanced German II
Deutsch im Blick – 2nd Edition
Zsuzsanna Abrams (University of Texas at Austin)
2017
Licence: CC BY 4.0
This textbook includes all 10 chapters of Deutsch im Blick. It accompanies the web-based first-year German program developed and in use at the University of Texas since 2008, and its companion site, Grimm Grammar. Deutsch im Blick is an open-access site with free and open multimedia resources, which requires neither password nor fees. For beginner and early intermediate students of German.
Format: PDF
Includes: Pronunciation, group activities, cultural information, reading tasks, writing activities, and games
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
ALG 1901 Elementary German I
ALG 1902 Elementary German II
ALG 2901 Intermediate German I
Italian Language and Culture (ITA)
Spunti: Italiano elementare 1
Daniel Leisawitz and Daniela Viale (Muhlenberg College)
2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Welcome to Spunti: Italiano elementare 1 – a new, unique program, authored by the Italian faculty of Muhlenberg College, that takes the place of a traditional language textbook. Spunti is a fully designed course that a college instructor of Italian can use and adapt.
Formats: Pressbooks WebBook, PDF, EPUB, and MOBI
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
ITA 1911 Elementary Italian I
Spunti: Italiano elementare 2
Daniel Leisawitz and Daniela Viale (Muhlenberg College)
2018
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Welcome to Spunti: Italiano elementare 2 – a new, unique program, authored by the Italian faculty of Muhlenberg College, that takes the place of a traditional language textbook. Spunti is a fully designed course that a college instructor of Italian can use and adapt.
Formats: Pressbooks WebBook, PDF, EPUB, and MOBI
Suggested for:
ITA 1912 Elementary Italian II
Spunti: Italiano intermedio
Daniela Viale (Muhlenberg College)
2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Welcome to Spunti: italiano intermedio – a unique program, authored by the Italian faculty of Muhlenberg College, that takes the place of a traditional language textbook. Spunti is a fully designed course that a college instructor of Italian can use and adapt.
Formats: Pressbooks WebBook, PDF, EPUB, and MOBI
Suggested for:
ITA 2911 Intermediate Italian I
ITA 2912 Intermediate Italian II
Japanese (JPN)
Beginning Japanese for Professionals: Book 1
Emiko Konomi (Portland State University)
2015
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
This textbook is designed for beginning learners who want to learn basic Japanese for the purpose of living and working in Japan. Unlike textbooks written primarily for students, whose content largely centers on student life, this book focuses more on social and professional life beyond school.
As a beginning level textbook, this book includes many elementary grammar patterns (Japanese Language Proficiency Test Levels 5 and 4), but the vocabulary and situations are selected specifically for working adults. Explanations are kept concise so as to only cover key points. The main focus is on oral communication and the accompanying audio is to be used extensively. This textbook can be used for self-study, as part of an online course, or as a traditional college course.
Format: Online and PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
JPN 1901 Introduction to Japanese I
JPN 1902 Introduction to Japanese II
Beginning Japanese for Professionals: Book 2
Emiko Konomi (Portland State University)
2017
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
This textbook is designed for beginning learners who want to learn basic Japanese for the purpose of living and working in Japan. Unlike textbooks written primarily for students, whose content largely centers on student life, this book focuses more on social and professional life beyond school.
As a beginning level textbook, this book includes many elementary grammar patterns (Japanese Language Proficiency Test Levels 5 and 4), but the vocabulary and situations are selected specifically for working adults. Explanations are kept concise so as to only cover key points. The main focus is on oral communication and the accompanying audio is to be used extensively. This textbook can be used for self-study, as part of an online course, or as a traditional college course.
Format: Online, PDF, and Word
Suggested for:
JPN 1901 Introduction to Japanese I
JPN 1902 Introduction to Japanese II
Beginning Japanese for Professionals: Book 3
Emiko Konomi (Portland State University)
2018
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
This textbook is designed for beginning learners who want to learn basic Japanese for the purpose of living and working in Japan. Unlike textbooks written primarily for students, whose content largely centers on student life, this book focuses more on social and professional life beyond school.
As a beginning level textbook, this book includes many elementary grammar patterns (Japanese Language Proficiency Test Levels 5 and 4), but the vocabulary and situations are selected specifically for working adults. Explanations are kept concise so as to only cover key points. The main focus is on oral communication and the accompanying audio is to be used extensively. This textbook can be used for self-study, as part of an online course, or as a traditional college course.
Audio files are also available online
Format: Online, PDF, and Word
Suggested for:
JPN 1901 Introduction to Japanese I
JPN 1902 Introduction to Japanese II
Preadvanced Japanese
Emiko Konomi (Portland State University)
2018
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
Preadvanced Japanese is designed for students who have intermediate competency in Japanese, roughly at Level 2 on the ILR (The Interagency Language Roundtable) proficiency scale, and are working on reaching Level 3.
This textbook can be used for self-study, as part of an online course, and in a traditional classroom setting. It is comprised of four chapters, intended to be covered in one term of a quarter system. Each chapter has Drills on expressions and grammar, Kanji Drills, and Listening Exercises. These activities are to be performed using the accompanying audio.
Formats: PDF and online
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
JPN 2901 Intermediate Japanese I
JPN 2902 Intermediate Japanese II
Latin American Studies (ELA)
No suggested OER at this time.
Polish (PLN)
No suggested OER at this time.
Portuguese (POR)
Bate-Papo: An Introduction to Portuguese
Eduardo Viana da Silva (University of Washington)
2019
Licence: CC BY 4.0
This book was developed having in mind university students who speak English as their first language. We also took into consideration speakers of Spanish by highlighting some key similarities and differences between the two languages. The main focus of this edition is on Brazilian Portuguese. Occasionally, we highlight main differences between Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese spoken in Africa and Asia, and European Portuguese. This e-book emphasizes meaningful communicative activities for a classroom setting, focusing on everyday language in Brazilian Portuguese.
Formats: Pressbooks WebBooks, EPUB, and PDF
Includes: Interactive activities and podcasts
Suggested for:
POR 1901 Elementary Portuguese I
POR 1902 Elementary Portuguese II
Português para principiantes
Severino J. Albuquerque (University of Wisconsin)
2016
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Português para principiantes is a time-tested text which can be used in conjunction with a variety of approaches to the teaching of beginning Portuguese. This media-rich text is designed to provide learners with a solid grammatical basis for using Brazilian Portuguese as well as regular opportunities to practice and improve their ability to read, speak, and understand the Portuguese language as it is used in contemporary Brazil.
Formats: Pressbooks WebBook, PDF, EPUB, and MOBI
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
POR 1901 Elementary Portuguese I
POR 1902 Elementary Portuguese II
ClicaBrasil: Portuguese Language and Culture for Intermediate Students
Vivian Flanzer (University of Texas)
2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
ClicaBrasil was developed for intermediate-level Portuguese language courses at UT-Austin. People all over the world are now using it for different purposes: self-study, classroom instruction, tutoring, or as a pastime. The lessons in ClicaBrasil integrate reading, writing, listening and reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, oral communication, and cultural activities. Numerous video clips (157, to be precise!) show different Brazilians speaking about their lives, their culture, and their country support and enhance these activities.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
POR 2901 Intermediate Portuguese I
POR 2902 Intermediate Portuguese II
Conversa Brasileira
Orlando R. Kelm (University of Texas at Austin)
2013
Licence: CC BY 3.0
Conversa Brasileira is an online open-access site that contains a series of 35 video scenarios in which Brazilians talk about their daily activities, everything from hobbies to shopping, and from traffic jams to soccer games. These materials are designed to help intermediate- and advanced-level learners of Portuguese to analyze the way that Brazilians really talk and improve in their own proficiency and fluency. This textbook provides a hard copy of all of the online materials, including the dialog transcriptions, English translations, and lesson notes that link to the original website.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
POR 2901 Intermediate Portuguese I
POR 2902 Intermediate Portuguese II
POR 3901 Advanced Portuguese I
POR 3902 Advanced Portuguese II
Russian Language and Culture (RUS)
“The Death of Ivan Ilich”: An Electronic Study Edition of the Russian Text
Gary R. Jahn (University of Minnesota)
2020
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
The Russian text of “The Death of Ivan Ilich” is presented for study in various formats: accompanied by an English translation; fully glossed, with explanatory and interpretive annotations; and supplemented by introductory remarks and an extensive bibliography.
Formats: Pressbooks WebBook, EPUB, and PDF
Suggested for:
RUS 2102 The Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
Decoding the 1920s: A Reader for Advanced Learners of Russian
Nila Friedberg (Portland State University)
2021
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
The materials presented in this book were developed for an advanced-level content-based Russian language course at Portland State University entitled “Russian Literature of the Twentieth Century: The 1920s.” Literature of this period is a major part of the Russian canon, but is notoriously difficult for learners of Russian to read in the original, due both to its stylistic complexity and the relative obscurity of its historical, political, and cultural references. And yet, this decade is crucial for understanding Russia – not only in the Soviet period, but also today. This was the period, when Mikhail Zoshchenko, Isaak Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrei Platonov meticulously documented the birth of the “New Soviet Man,” his “newspeak” and Soviet bureaucratese; when Alexandra Kollontai, a Marxist revolutionary and a diplomat, wrote essays and fiction on the “New Soviet Woman”; when numerous satirical works were created; when Babel experimented with a literary representation of dialects (e.g., Odessa Russian or Jewish Russian). These varieties of language have not disappeared. Bureaucrats still use some form of bureaucratese. Numerous contemporary TV shows imitate the dialects that Babel described. Moreover, Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” gave rise, due largely to its film adaptation, to catch-phrases that still appear throughout contemporary Russian media, satirical contexts, and everyday conversation. Thus, the Russian literature of the 1920s does not belong exclusively to the past, but has relevance and interpretive power for the present, and language learners who wish to pursue a career in humanities, media analysis, analytical translation, journalism, or international relations must understand this period and the linguistic patterns it established.
The textbook is intended for adult learners, and contains language assignments that would, on the one hand, help students transition to ACTFL’s Advanced proficiency level (i.e., be able to create “narratives, descriptions, and summaries … using paraphrasing and elaboration” (ACTFL 2012: 12).), but at the same time promote meaningful engagement with literary texts. The assignments in this textbook are multilevel ones, and thus offer a solution for multilevel classes that include literate heritage Russian speakers, Intermediate High, Advanced, or even Superior-level readers.
Format: PDF
Suggested for:
RUS 4905 Advanced Russian III
Spanish (ESP)
Hola a Todos: Elementary Spanish I∗
Mariana Stone, Elizabeth Combier, Kristi Hislope, Valerie Hastings, Rosaria Meek, and Alvaro Torres-Calderon (University of North Georgia)
2018
Licence: CC BY 4.0
A textbook for introductory Spanish.
Formats: PDF
Includes: Grammar and vocabulary pre-class activities, lectures, and post-class homework
Suggested for:
ESP 1991 Elementary Spanish I [as supplementary text]
ESP 1992 Elementary Spanish II [as supplementary text]
Erin Huebener and Jessica Steinberg (Spokane Community College)
2018
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
A textbook for introductory Spanish that has been positively reviewed.
Formats: PDF; online text at LibreTexts
Includes: Activities and videos
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
ESP 1991 Elementary Spanish I
ESP 1992 Elementary Spanish II
Spanish I: Beginning Spanish Language and Culture
Matthew Dean (Humbolt State University)
2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This peer-reviewed textbook is designed for the true beginner with U.S. college students in mind. It contains themed chapters, which are divided into 8 sections. Each section has its own set of learning objectives, and is further separated into three types of assignments, Para estudiar en casa (with detailed explanations), Para practicar en casa (homework exercises), and Para practicar en clase (paired and group classwork activities). The explanations and primary input are written to be easily comprehensible. The individual exercises are geared towards acquisition of form and function, and the communicative classwork exercises promote interpersonal exchanges between students. The digital copy includes some embedded audio files, and we are developing a website to house many more resources.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
ESP 1991 Elementary Spanish I
ESP 1992 Elementary Spanish II
La lingüística hispánica: Una introducción
Ashwini Ganeshan (Ohio University)
2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book, a work in progress, is aimed at students of Spanish in universities in the USA and intends to offer a brief and simple introduction to the field of Hispanic Linguistics. It includes basic concepts in linguistics, essays that address topic of social relevance connecting linguistics to everyday life, and exercises to practice the concepts. Links to relevant material across the internet are also provided. The book is entirely created from texts and materials authored by mainly undergraduate students and it also includes the work and effort of student-editors, as part of a long-term open pedagogy project.
Formats: Pressbooks WebBook, PDF, EPUB, and MOBI
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
ESP 3943 Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics
Recorridos por la literatura hispana: Aventuras de don Quijote de la Mancha
Betsy Arnold and Pose Potter (University of Texas at Austin)
2017
Licence: CC BY 4.0
The language of the Siglo de Oro can be an insurmountable barrier for many readers. This textbook provides historical information, narrative techniques, lists of characters, themes and keywords before they begin to read each chapter of Don Quixote. While reading, vocabulary glossed in comprehensible Spanish appears in the margin opposite challenging words. Cultural references and proverbs from the work facilitate a deeper understanding. Each chapter contains checks for understanding and ends with activities to build vocabulary. It includes required chapters 1-8, 10, 17 and 74 for AP classrooms.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggestion for:
ESP 4919 The Novel
Acceso: University of Kansas Collaborative Digital Spanish Project
Amy Rossomondo (KU Open Language Resource Center)
2019
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
Open-access, digital learning environment designed to promote the acquisition of Spanish and the development of cultural understanding of the varied groups of people who share Spanish as a common language.
Format: Online
Suggestion for:
ESP 2911 Contemporary Spanish Culture
Yiddish (YDD)
No suggested OER at this time.