Online Language Support (OLS)

Dear Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps national agencies,

Dive into 2024 with our January edition of the Online Language Support Newsletter, filled with the latest insights, updates and resources. This month we’re immersing mobility participants in the music of language – exploring the colour, texture, and rhythm of sounds through engaging listening and speaking exercises. Please help us to ensure that mobility participants hear all about it – and let them know how to add audio comments in the forums – see TIPS for the details.

To help carve those new neural language pathways, OLS community managers are dishing up a range of activities for students to learn in new contexts, from cooking and listening to music to keeping a notebook, which will enrich their experience in another country. See the Community managers and forums section below for details, and be sure to tell your mobility participants.

As we step into the rhythm of the new year, a parade of events and festivals during the rest of the year will keep us active. To help get students prepared, there’s a new B1 course – see New features and content below.

The Erasmus Student Network has published the first edition of Erasmus: A Complete Guide e-book! Two chapters will interest mobility participants looking for language-related advice: Erasmus: booster of your foreign language skills, page 54; and How to learn a foreign language, page 60.

We end this note with a big thanks to you for helping us spread the word about OLS to mobility participants last year and we hope you can continue to do so in the new year!

Regards,

The OLS team

‘What an event’ will help B1 students of English, French, German, Italian and Spanish learn about annual celebrations in countries where these languages are spoken: the Dún laoghaire-rathdown festival in Ireland to support social inclusion, and carnivals in Cologne, Germany; Viareggio, Italy; Sevilla, Spain; and La Réunion, France.

Mobility participants will learn how to talk about an event and use expressions for describing a concert, saying what struck a chord with them, and what didn’t.

To access the links to the modules mentioned below, you first need to be enrolled in the course.

• English: What an event! 
• French: Quel événement!
• German: Was für ein Ereignis!
• Italian: Che evento! 
• Spanish: ¡Qué celebración!

Learning language is easier when combined with an activity like cooking or listening to the lyrics of a song. Our OLS community managers have some hot new activities for mobility participants to engage all their senses in learning:

• Mobility participants who want speaking practice for making their OLS video contest videos should join English community manager Iya’s Listen Up! series. A selection of audio recordings will get students to sharpen their listening and talking skills. See Tips for how to make an audio recording. 
• What’s the foundation of learning any language? Dutch community manager Marieke has the answer with a 7-Day Challenge for mobility participants to fire up their Dutch skills. They can find it in the OLS blog section of the Dutch learning community and resources. 
• What’s the trickiest part of making a tortilla de patatas? Spanish students can find the answer in this step-by-step video which Bernat, the Spanish OLS community manager, has served up. It’s a cooking and language lesson combined. 
• Want to know who Brikkuni, Joon and Kym Pepe are? Students learning Maltese will find the answer in the OLS blog, Contemporary Music from Malta I, courtesy of Maltese community manager Kurt.
• Do your mobility participants know about the Goldlist method for building  vocabulary? Slovak community manager Andrea explains how it’s done in her mastering vocabulary blog, in the OLS Slovak learning community.

Help us keep mobility participants aware of new features and developments on the platform by downloading the communication materials for January from the toolbox below. Prepared by the OLS team, it contains posts and visuals to share on your social media networks, and an email to send to participants. Make use of both to reach as many participants as possible.

Kindly note that to download the toolbox with its communication materials, you must first login on the EU Academy and then enrol in this course.

To add an audio reply to a post in one of the forums of an OLS learning community is easy. Students need to click on ‘Reply’, in the bottom right corner of the forum post they want to respond to (Step 1), and then click on ‘Advanced’ (Step 2).

They then need to click on the microphone icon in the toolbar (Step 3) and then on ‘Start recording’ which will appear in the red bar (Step 4).