Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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A grammar of Mauwake
Liisa Berghäll · Language Science Press · 2015
This grammar provides a synchronic grammatical description of Mauwake, a Papuan Trans-New Guinea (TNG) language of about 2000 speakers on the north coast of the Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. It is the first book-length treatment of the Mauwake language and the only published grammar of the Kumil subgroup to date. Relying on other existing published and unpublished grammars, the author shows how the language is similar to, or different from, related TNG languages especially in the Madang province. The grammar gives a brief introduction to the Mauwake people, their environment and their culture. Although the book mainly covers morphology and syntax, it also includes ashort treatment of the phonological system and the orthography. The description of the grammatical units proceeds from the words/morphology to the phrases, clauses, sentence types and clause combinations. The chapter on functional domains is the only one where the organization is based on meaning/function rather than structure. The longest chapter in the book is on morphology, with verbs taking the central stage. The final chapter deals with the pragmatic functions theme, topic and focus. 13 texts by native speakers, mostly recorded and transcribed but some originally written, are included in the Appendix with morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and a free translation. The theoretical approach used is that of Basic Linguistic Theory. Language typologists and professional Papuanist linguists are naturally one target audience for the grammar. But also two other possible, and important, audiences influenced especially the style the writing: well educated Mauwake speakers interested in their language, and those other Papua New Guineans who have some basic training in linguistics and are keen to explore their own languages.
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A grammar of Rapa Nui
Paulus Kieviet · Language Science Press · 2017
This book is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island. After an introductory chapter, the grammar deals with phonology, word classes, the noun phrase, possession, the verb phrase, verbal and nonverbal clauses, mood and negation, and clause combinations. The phonology of Rapa Nui reveals certain issues of typological interest, such as the existence of strict conditions on the phonological shape of words, word-final devoicing, and reduplication patterns motivated by metrical constraints. For Polynesian languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs in the lexicon has often been denied; in this grammar it is argued that this distinction is needed for Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui has sometimes been characterised as an ergative language; this grammar shows that it is unambiguously accusative. Subject and object marking depend on an interplay of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. Other distinctive features of the language include the existence of a ‘neutral’ aspect marker, a serial verb construction, the emergence of copula verbs, a possessive-relative construction, and a tendency to maximise the use of the nominal domain. Rapa Nui’s relationship to the other Polynesian languages is a recurring theme in this grammar; the relationship to Tahitian (which has profoundly influenced Rapa Nui) especially deserves attention. The grammar is supplemented with a number of interlinear texts, two maps and a subject index.
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Rhetorical Communities: Understanding Language, Power, and Communication Across Contexts
Leigh Meredith; Phil Choong; Melisa Garcia · Leigh Meredith, Phil Choong, and Melisa Garcia · 2025
Rhetorical Communities guides students in analyzing and engaging with the practices, values, and expectations that shape communication within different communities. Beginning with foundational concepts of rhetoric and discourse community theory, the text progresses through genre analysis, audience and context, composing processes, collaboration, and ethical considerations, while highlighting how identity and power influence discourse. Emphasizing real-world examples and community contexts, this book helps students understand and participate in rhetorical practices across academic, professional, and civic settings.
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Writing Our Bodies
Sunayani Bhattacharya; Meghan Sweeney; Yin Yuan; Gina Kessler Lee · Saint Mary's College of California · 2025
Writing Our Bodies offers students a holistic approach to writing that intertwines embodied rhetorics with critical inquiry and academic conventions. Beginning with an introduction to rhetorical embodiment and personal experience, the text guides learners through writing to analyze, take a stand, revise, synthesize sources, and make arguments with research, while attending to how identity, technology, linguistic diversity, and power influence both reading and writing. Emphasizing reflection, audience awareness, disciplinary literacy, and ethical source use, this resource prepares students to write purposefully across contexts and audiences.
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The Muse: Misunderstandings and Their Remedies
Eric Detweiler; Paul Evans; Amy Fant; Amy Harris-Aber · Middle Tennessee State University
An open-access textbook composed to support Middle Tennessee State University's ENGL 1010: Expository Writing course. In this book, we adopt this exploratory orientation to communication, inviting you too to consider writing across contexts, its many consequent misunderstandings, and satisfying moments of remedy.
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An Introduction to the Analysis of Fiction
Michael Walonen · Saint Peter's University Press · 2023
An introductory primer introducing undergraduate students to the methodology of analyzing works of fiction.
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Alternatives to Agonism: Ethical Approaches to Argument in the Composition Classroom
Kristina Fennelly · The Pennsylvania Alliance for Design of Open Textbooks (PA-ADOPT) · 2025
This textbook urges students to reconsider traditional notions of argument by inviting them to explore non-adversarial approaches to the arguments that structure their academic and every day lives. After briefly exploring familiar aspects of the “argument culture”—a pervasive, warlike approach to polarizing issues—the textbook turns its attention to unearth more constructive approaches based in listening rhetoric, feminist rhetoric, Rogerian rhetoric, empathy, respect, civility, and an overall ethical treatment of argument. Using the context of a town hall meeting, students are guided in practicing deliberation, investigation, and content analysis of arguments that play out in public social media forums. Chapters feature class discussion exercises, sample essay assignments, and links to relevant Ted Talks, podcasts, and other multi-media sources. The textbook concludes with reflection pieces written by Kutztown University students, alumni, faculty, and staff who all seek to answer the prevailing question of this textbook: “What does it mean to be a worthy arguer?”
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Advanced Composition
Collette Bliss; Ashleigh Severson · University of Arkansas · 2024
Welcome to Advanced Composition! In this course, we embark on a journey through the art and craft of writing, exploring various forms, styles, and purposes of composition. Over the semester, we will delve into four distinct units, each designed to equip students with the necessary information to complete the four major assignments in the course.
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Just YA
Sarah Donovan · Oklahoma State University · 2024
This open-access anthology features short texts that can be read in a single class period and are designed to spark deep conversations. Organized around themes of being, love, land, world, and futures, these poems, essays, and flash fiction offer inclusive and affirming perspectives to align with junior high and high school English language arts (ELA) curriculum. With contributions from acclaimed young adult authors, flash fiction writers, and teacher-poets, Just YA provides educators with contemporary texts that resonate with and inspire today’s students to write their own stories. The overall work, JustYA, is licensed CC BY. Each of the chapters, however, are licensed CC-BY-NC-ND. This means you may re-use and share portions of the book, but the authors request that individual pieces be left intact as originally written when used in subsequent works.
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A Guide to Composition
Sandra Leonard · The Pennsylvania Alliance for Design of Open Textbooks (PA-ADOPT) · 2025
A Guide to Composition (2025) is an introduction to college writing and research. The text begins by defining basic principles of rhetoric and composition using popular texts such as advertisements, speeches, and news media. This textbook then moves to the specific genres of narrative and argument. Elements of the writing process are emphasized throughout the text in addressing writing center use, idea generation, library use, peer review, and ethical attribution including some discussion of A.I. Each chapter is written by current or former Kutztown University faculty and students, making it particularly well-suited to Kutztown University students; however, chapters two through eight are particularly inviting to wider audiences. Each chapter contains a number of writing process activities that may be useful as classroom activities or homework assignments.
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Music Composition & Theory
Justin Rubin · University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing · 2024
A Step-by-Step Method for student composers to write in a variety of styles, genres, and forms. Driven by simple model examples and accompanied by audio samples, it is intended to develop individual creativity and confidence in writing and, in so doing, explore the student’s inherent expressive talents. Each chapter provides reference examples from the literature for the student to discover works by master composers.
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Polyphony: Reader and Explorations for First-Year Writing
Jennie Snow; Elise Takehana; Diego Ubiera · ROTEL · 2024
Polyphony is a functional, creative, and radical resource for facilitating critical conversations about multilingualism, the politics of language, and linguistic justice in the first-year writing classroom. Texts and activities explore diverse perspectives on themes like silencing/voicing, language extinction and reclamation, (in)visibility, translation, agency, and validation, among others. Designed for use by both instructors and students, this book is meant to be used in a variety of combinations and highlights multiple modes of writing, including personal narrative, textual analysis, argumentation, reflection, and research. Embracing a “polyphonic” approach to first-year writing, this book presents connections between texts, authors, and ideas that actively engage students and instructors in critical conversations about language, education, and the institutionalization of both.
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Literary Studies for a Sustainable Future: An Introductory Course with Social Justice and Ecocriticism Intersections
Lisette Espinoza Vazquez · ROTEL · 2024
Literary Studies for a Sustainable Future: An Introductory Course with Social Justice and Ecocriticism Intersections is a university literature textbook that offers a sampling of the vast array of storytelling and literary traditions from around the world. Led by course outcomes, the book’s readings, activities, and assignments aim to establish a 21st century framework. Novice literary scholars establish correlations between local and regional literature with those from distant lands on relevant concerns and topics, like those outlined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Through songs and folklore, film clips, poetry, myth, storytelling, and satirical theater, its chapters feature key literary texts and terms to present literature as vital community-sustaining cultural expressions. Learners witness the roles literature have on climate, ecology, and social justice challenges.
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Green Tea Intermediate English Communication OER
Eric Dodson; Luciana Diniz; Nanci Leiton · Open Oregon Educational Resources · 2020
This set of multimedia materials incorporates interesting topics and real-world language in an accessible way for adult English language learners at the low-to-mid intermediate level, using eclectic methods (communicative activities, content-based instruction lite, focus on form), all while maintaining a connection to our learners’ lives. Each unit has handouts, presentation slides, key vocabulary lists, informative speeches recorded by ESOL teachers at PCC, dialogs, extension activities, and additional videos or materials for assessment. The videos can be linked to directly, embedded in a class page or Learning Management System (LMS, such as Canvas), or downloaded. Closed captioned versions of the videos are also available. Teachers can incorporate everything here, or take an a la carte approach with their existing activities and curricula. To make it easier to navigate these materials, we are gathering them in a pressbooks site as well. That site may make it easier for teachers to navigate and share links with students. Like any set of classroom materials, this OER is not a “class in a box.” We anticipate that teachers will have their own approach to in-class (or synchronous online) activities, out-of-class work, assessments, and speeches, so we’re not offering a one-size-fits-all solution. These materials are openly shared (with the exception of youtube videos, where noted), which means you have all the permission you need to use, adapt, and re-share them. All we ask is to attribute the materials to “Green Tea Communication OER,” and, if you have a moment, let us know if you found the materials helpful. Please let us know if you have feedback, questions, or additional contributions to this project: eric.dodson@pcc.edu, luciana.diniz@pcc.edu and nleiton@pcc.edu
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A Short Handbook for writing essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Dan Allosso; Salvatore Allosso · Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project · 2019
A retired master teacher of English and Comparative Literature teams up with his son, a History professor, on a new version of the writing manual he wrote and used for decades at the University of California, Davis.
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Creative Translation for Real-World Contexts: English ↔ Spanish
Remy Attig · Bowling Green State University Libraries · 2024
Creative Translation for Real-World Contexts is one of the first translation textbooks designed for Spanish/English speakers at an intermediate-high (B2) level. This book introduces students to the basic ideas of translation while addressing frequent pain points that recur when working bidirectionally. Additionally, a focus is placed on fostering metacognitive skills by encouraging creative translation from real-world environments such as narration, business, advertising, specialized contexts (including inclusive and queer language), and in situations when there are no clear translations available, such as sci-fi and fantasy works. Chapters alternate between Spanish and English as the languages of discussion, thus providing an equitable challenge for native speakers of both languages.
![Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing [Revised Edition]](/api/files/covers/otl-1620.webp)
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Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing [Revised Edition]
Kisha Tracy · ROTEL · 2024
In first-year writing courses, it can often feel that we practice writing and research in a vacuum. Writing is about communication, and, if we do not feel that we have an audience, then it can seem like our writing has no purpose (even though practice of any kind will help us develop these skills). Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing is a method for students to think about the social changes that were prevalent during the COVID years and remain important in their wake. Heritages of Change is a lens for thinking and writing about these ideas. Through curation and exhibition as an act of activism, students focus on a specific audience with whom they can communicate authentically about this dynamic world.
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(Re)Writing Communities and Identities
Phillip Marzluf; Anna Goins; Cindy Debes; Stacia Gray · New Prairie Press · 2021
(Re)Writing Communities and Identities enables college-level students to develop their ability to compose various informative and expressive genres, including analyses, reflections, summaries, syntheses, and informative reports. While students raise their consciousness about their writing process and audience-based informative strategies, they also familiarize themselves with important social and cultural issues related to the theme of "identities and communities."
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Introduction to Literature: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and How They Shape Us
Judy Young · University of West Florida Pressbooks · 2023
Introduction to Literature: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and How They Shape Us introduces college freshmen to the study of literature through a focus on texts that, generally, they already know, or think they know, and how those texts aim to shape audiences to be compliant cultural objects. The book is organized around several prominent story groups, including various genres and forms, meant to promote discussion and discovery leading to students’ understanding that these texts function as cultural sculptors of readers’ principles and behaviors. Students develop the skill of analyzing texts and creating sound arguments about them through class discussions and a series of writing assignments. Ideally, they leave the course understanding how to create a sound argument and, more pointedly, that there is no such thing as “just a story.”
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Surface and Subtext: Literature, Research, Writing
James Francis, Jr.; Claire Carly-Miles; Kimberly Clough; R. Paul Cooper · Texas A&M University · 2024
Open-educational resource textbook created by the TAMU English 203 OER Committee.