Open Educational Resources and Practices for Language Vitality: the Case of Latgalian Sanita Lazdiņa and Ilga Šuplinska

1. 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

2. Overview
1. Latgalian: a Short Background
2. Language Vitality and New Domains and Media
3. OER and Learning to Apply New Digital Tools: A Few Examples
4. From Language Practices towards Policies

3. 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

4. Latgalian - vulnerable
UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/index.php

5. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/language-vitality/

6. 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/

7. 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!)

8. 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)).

9. sanita.lazdina@ru.lv
ilga.suplinska@ru.lv