About Acceso

The Acceso curriculum drew initial inspiration from the Modern Language Association's 2007 report "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World". We envisioned Acceso as an answer to the call for innovative language curricula that enable students to develop translingual and transcultural competence, the ability not only to comprehend the written and spoken language, but also “to comprehend speakers of the target language as members of foreign societies and to grasp themselves as Americans—that is, as members of a society that is foreign to others…[and] to relate to fellow members of their own society who speak languages other than English.” By placing the creation and implementation of this new resource at the center of the Spanish Basic Language Program, we also endeavored to answer the MLA’s call for graduate programs to provide “substantive training in language teaching and in the use of new technologies.”

Acceso is intended as a complete curriculum for intermediate-level learners of Spanish but it can certainly be used as a foundational text or as a supplement to other intermediate and advanced curricula. The materials on this website are provided freely to the public as an Open Educational Resource (OER) in support of broader educational affordability and access; instructors may also request free access to detailed lesson plans, rubrics for the evaluation of student work, and reliable instruments for measuring student progress and learning outcomes. These free materials are supplemented by an optional commercial workbook called Acceso Hub: Forma y Función.

The specific short-term objectives of Acceso are:

to create a cost-effective, web-based curriculum that develops transcultural and translingual competence among language learners,
to facilitate hands-on training for graduate teaching assistants in the use of technology in the classroom and in refining this curriculum,
to provide outreach and support materials to secondary and post-secondary institutions that wish to implement the Acceso curriculum.

The longer-term objectives of Acceso are:

to foster collaboration with other institutions that wish to contribute to the continued evolution of Acceso,
to serve as a model that can be readily applied to the study of other languages.

Acceso began in 2009 as a collaboration between the Spanish language program and the staff of the Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center at the University of Kansas. The curriculum was built on a shoestring budget and was reliant upon volunteer work from dozens of graduate students whose impact is still clear in the varied topics that make up the curriculum. In 2012 that first edition of Acceso was recognized with a Focus award from the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium.

Work on a new edition of Acceso was made possible by a Language Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education (2018-22) that funded materials creation in Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Ukrainian; during that grant the Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center also began the process of changing its name to the Open Language Resource Center. This new edition of Acceso, which was the flaship project of the LRC grant, is envisioned as an ever-evolving work in progress that is updated continually.

A list of recent updates is provided to give those considering adoption a sense of ongoing activities and to give continuing users a way to modify lesson plans.

This website includes materials developed under grant P229A180008 from the U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

How to Cite Acceso

An individual module:

Glasset, Zach. "Cristina Martínez: Chef, Inmigrante y Madre." Acceso, Open Language Resource Center, https://acceso.ku.edu/unidad1/almanaque/chef.shtml", Accessed [insert date].

The work as a whole:

Rossomondo, Amy, editor, Acceso, Open Language Resource Center, https://acceso.ku.edu, Accessed [insert date].