Authentic Englishes.nrw

Ready-to-teach, interactive OER materials in the field "Varieties of English" have been produced in the project "Authentic Englishes.nrw" focusing on the Bachelor's level at universities. The unique features of the materials are the different audio clips on the topics of World Englishes, British English, American English, Nigerian English, Scottish English and South African English. Every unit comes with an introductory section for all six varieties as well as at least one unit on "understanding the variety", which offers different listening tasks, focusing on motivating the user to indeed trying to comprehend the spoken language. The units "describing the variety" provide detailed linguistic information on the phonetic-phonological characteristics of the respective variety. For some varieties, additional units on the lexicon, grammar and pragmatics are available. All units provide a wealth of audio clips, linguistic knowledge as well as interactive exercises and tests with immediate feedback. Special attention has been given to shaping the units didactically by stating the learning outcomes of each unit as well as the specific linguistic competences. All units are designed to be used in Bachelor study programmes. Depending on prior knowledge, the units can also be used in Master study programmes. The introductory section as well as parts of the units "understanding the variety" - especially the audio examples - can also be used for teaching in schools. All units are available under the licence CC-BY-SA 4.0 as H5P content. Further information on the project: The interactive OER materials are suitable for subject-specific linguistic study programmes as well as for teacher training. The curriculum for grammar schools and comprehensive schools in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany, explicitly calls for an increased awareness of English varieties in teacher training. This includes enabling prospective teachers to embed different varieties of English in their teaching in a targeted way. However, at the beginning of the project (2020), hardly any suitable materials were available, especially for university teaching. For this reason, researchers from the universities of Paderborn, Bielefeld and Münster developed innovative teaching/learning materials on varieties of English using digital media as part of the joint project "Authentic Englishes.nrw". The focus has been on the two areas of competence that are essential for future teachers in relation to the core curriculum at schools and that promote their knowledge of varieties overall: 'understanding' and 'describing'. In addition to the two varieties of British and American English taught in the classroom in Germany, linguistic materials on different varieties of English are provided and prepared in a target group-oriented and contemporary way in the form of H5P activities (Course Presentation, Interactive Video and Timeline). In a first step, the newly created teaching/learning materials were tested and evaluated at the participating universities and are now be made available for teaching at universities and schools throughout NRW via ORCA.nrw in a second step. The materials created in the project are based on the software H5P, which is integrated into most common learning management systems. A great advantage of H5P is the intuitive handling of the materials and also the enormously simple further distribution and use in the sense of Open Educational Resources. In addition to the didactically prepared H5P units which are ready-to-teach, the project also offers the audio clips (raw material) for Nigerian English in the form of an H5P file, so that teachers can choose the audio material that best suits their needs.