The UCLA Language Materials Project (LMP) maintained a web resource about teaching materials for some 150 languages that are less commonly taught in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

. The project, funded by the

U.S. Department of Education The United States Department of Education is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government. It began operating on May 4, 1980, having been created after the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was split into the Department ...

, was created in 1992. It is part of the

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a Normal school, teachers colle ...

Center for World Languages. Funding was terminated in 2014 and the Language Materials Project website deactivated.

Bibliographic database of teaching materials

The website provided full bibliographic information for over 7000 items, including textbooks, readers, phrasebooks, grammars, dictionaries, and supplementary materials that are distributed in print, audio, video, web and computerized instruction formats. It offered detailed descriptions of the content and other features of each material, to help users find the most appropriate tools for their individual teaching and learning needs. Items could be located quickly through menus displayed at the top of each webpage, or through an advanced search. The LMP did not sell the materials listed in the database, but did provide information on retailers and distributors where the materials can be obtained.

Database and guide to authentic materials

The website also provided citations of about 1000 Authentic Materials, language materials originally intended for

native speaker Native Speaker may refer to: * ''Native Speaker'' (novel), a 1995 novel by Chang-Rae Lee * ''Native Speaker'' (album), a 2011 album by Canadian band Braids * Native speaker, a person using their first language or mother tongue {{disambigua ...

s rather than

second-language learner Language education – the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language – is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: ...

s. Because such items reflect current culture and actual language usage, they are much valued as teaching tools. The database presented native-language posters, signs, advertisements, product labels, games, maps, schedules, and brochures that can be downloaded for free from the LMP website. There are also links to selected external websites that offer native-language audio, video, and print resources. The Authentic Materials page provided a guide to using those materials in the classroom, including sample lesson plans.

Language profiles

Each LMP language had its own webpage, providing a language profile, a direct link to the LMP citations for that language, and links to relevant external websites for teachers and students of the language. The profile provided a map, a description of key dialects, grammatical features, relationship to other languages, a linguistic history, and sociolinguistic information.

Materials reports

These reports provided a numeric summary of the categories of materials cited for each language in the database. They were used by publishers and policy makers to assess the U.S. availability of teaching materials for a given language.

CARLA database

A direct link to the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

's database of the courses in less commonly taught languages offered by over 2000 schools, colleges and other programs in the U.S. and Canada. CARLA stands for Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition.

CAL database

An additional database of teaching materials for less commonly taught languages, produced by the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC, and hosted by the LMP. It offers brief summaries of materials for languages beyond the 150 in the LMP database.

Links for language teachers

The LMP website offered selected links to language resource centers, professional language teachers' associations, scholarly publications, and distributors of language-teaching materials.

K-12 language-teaching resources

A separate portal for people teaching less commonly taught languages to students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Offerings included a section on curricular frameworks and standards, links to dozens of outside resources for

K-12 K-1 is a professional kickboxing promotion established in 1993, well known worldwide mainly for its heavyweight division fights and Grand Prix tournaments. In January 2012, K-1 Global Holdings Limited, a company registered in Hong Kong, acquir ...

language teachers, and a year's worth of free lesson plans for teachers to download and adapt to their own classrooms. The lessons were grouped into thematic units (e.g. 10 lessons on school, 5 lessons on likes and dislikes, 15 on friends and relationships), and offer lively activities for learning to communicate in the target language.

References

External links

* {{UCLA Linguistics organizations Organizations established in 1992 Organizations disestablished in 2014 Linguistic maps Language education materials 1992 establishments in California 2014 disestablishments in California