La Ruta de la Seda (The Silk Road)
La Ruta de la Seda (The Silk Road) educational material has been specially designed for learning Spanish through different aspects related to silk in Europe. The aim of its publication in the SILKNOW portal is to disseminate our cultural heritage and to highlight the cultural exchange that the production and trade of silk involved and still involves.
The material can be used by B1-level students of Spanish seeking autonomous learning and also by teachers for work within a course, in the classroom, or outside it. La Ruta de la Seda consists of four units related to the Silk Road and the traces it has left in our history and our present:
- The cities of the Silk Road
- History of silk in Europe
- Processes and creation of silk
- History of fashion
Each unit can be worked on independently, involves approximately three hours of work and includes three chapters and a total of 18 interactive activities to learn various cultural contents, broaden the lexical repertoire and consolidate grammatical competence.
The activities have been developed in various dynamics such as dragging, colouring, multiple choice questions, writing, relating, etc. It offers automatic feedback that allows the students to know if they have done the activity correctly, and if required, they can always access the automatic correction system, where the solution to the activity is provided. At the end of each topic, the students have access to a self-evaluation activity to review the most relevant contents. Likewise, the platform offers an automatic follow-up system that shows the students what they have done and what is left to be done, and places them at the point they were when they left the last session. These characteristics make this material ideal for autonomous work.
The material has been developed by Silknow researchers of the University of Valencia (Universitat de València), which has relied on the developers of the company ALTEN, and in collaboration with Instituto Cervantes, which has provided advice on the design and revision process, and has piloted it in its network of centres. We would like to thank the students and teachers of the Cervantes Institute centres in Belo Horizonte, Bucharest, Cairo, Lyon, Oran, Sao Paulo and Warsaw for their participation in the piloting of this material.
La Ruta de la Seda is freely accessible through https://silknow.uv.es/moodle/login/
Information for teachers. Table of contents.
– I found it so interesting that I started watching the “Marco Polo” series on Netflix.
– I liked the cultural content and discovering new things about cities I had visited in my travels.
– Combination between texts with many new words and grammar
Students who participated in the pilot
– This is a subject little known to my students, besides being a very dynamic, interactive and fun language learning experience…
– Attractive, fun, cultural, enriching material
Teachers who participated in the pilot
Information in Spanish