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Dr Napjadi Letsoalo leads the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages in turning the spotlight onto the potential role which technology can play in advancing multilingual education through open educational resources (OERs).

“The Covid-19 outbreak made it a necessity to promote open online learning, and the department has taken advantage of that,” says Letsoalo.

Dr Napjadi Letsoalo

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) defines OERs as “teaching, learning or research materials (text, modules, lesson plans, assessments, videos, study materials, media, and other digital assets) that are in the public domain or released with intellectual property licenses that facilitate the free use, adaptation and distribution of resources”.

The first multilingual OER which the department developed was the ‘SiNtu Multilingual Consonants Chart’, an interactive multimodal alphabetic system of phonetic notation, devised as a representation of the speech sounds in the languages (Sotho, Nguni and Tshivenda).

The other OER is ‘Speech Organ Movement’, which presents the classification of articulator movements during the articulation of speech sounds. The 46 consonants presented in this resource are organised according to their classification, from labial to glottal sounds. The description of the speech sounds is in terms of the airstream mechanisms, articulators, the state of the glottis (voicing), the state of the velum (oral or nasal), and the manner and place of articulation. This resource provides video illustrations (X-ray view) of the articulators producing the sounds, and is available for English and Sepedi, while the features describing the phonemes are presented in both languages.

For more information, visit: https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/corporate/default/Unisa-Open/OER-@-Unisa/Articulator-Movement

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*By Tebogo Mahlaela, Communication and Marketing Specialist, College of Human Sciences

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Publish date: 2022/02/24

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