center for educational resources in culture, language and literacy
--- Teacher Development ---▲
This project will put on a two-day workshop in fall 2008 led by a guest speaker in the field of intercultural competence. Workshop participants will examine appropriate content areas and systems of analysis for the development of intercultural competence and review the ACTFL Standards proposed for “Communication,” “Culture” and “Comparison” and also explore types of traditional and alternative performance assessments to measure culture learning. Participants will be asked to evaluate the workshop for its usefulness in furthering their knowledge and skills in developing the intercultural competence of their students. CERCLL will make the workshop proceedings available in printed and electronic form and/or will videotape the workshop and make that available.
Survey tools to collect geo-linguistic data regarding curricula, articulation practices, and course materials for commonly and less-commonly taught languages as well as information about interest in new offerings in LCTLs in southern Arizona schools at the K-16 level will be developed under this project. PAL will use its existing membership and infrastructure, including the annual Southern Arizona Language Fair and Second Language Teachers’ Symposium, to collect these data and also to assist in planning for the implementation of LCTLs in southern Arizona schools. A new, interactive PAL website will be developed that will allow public access to survey data; a chat room and question/answer opportunities will be part of the website, as well as a teacher weblog to post experiences about teaching commonly and less-commonly taught languages as well as information about the Language Fair and the PAL Symposium. Eventually, the website will be expanded to include web-linked activities and resources. PAL will also offer weekend workshops and/or summer institutes that showcase the work of CERCLL projects and faculty for K-16 teachers in Arizona. The workshops/institutes will serve as a model and resource for school/university collaborations nationwide.
A summer or pre-session institute in 2009, bringing together professionals in literacy development and linguistics with K-16 teachers, is central to this project. Teachers will be working with authentic materials in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) to enhance and expand their understanding of the development of literacy and cultural knowledge related to these languages. The institute will include breakout sessions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean that will focus on their linguistic structures and orthographies as they are pertinent to the reading process and comprehension of written texts. Workshop products will include a manual of reading strategy lessons; a bibliography of written materials, websites, CDs, and DVDs that can be used in the teaching of reading of East Asian languages; sets of procedures to help teachers select appropriate materials for their students based upon their interests and career needs; and a monograph of the materials developed for and during the workshop to serve as a model for similar workshops in other contexts. During 2006-2008, the materials for the workshop will be developed and bibliographies of research references related to the reading, teaching and linguistic structure of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean will be collected, reviewed and selected for inclusion. All of these products will be made available.
Although courses on the less commonly taught languages are usually not available until high school or college, K-8 teachers can introduce students to these languages and cultures in order to create an interest in foreign language study and in LCTLs in particular. Children’s and adolescent’s literature is a resource that is particularly effective in engaging students in exploring diverse global perspectives and languages. The specific goal of this project is to offer workshops for K-8 teachers on Korean/South Korea in fall 2007 and another LCTL and its country in fall 2008, co-taught by the project director and international graduate students from those countries. Teachers will receive background information on the country and language along with lists of resources, people, books and instruction in foreign language teaching strategies that can be used when neither the teacher nor the students speak the target language. After completing the workshop, teachers will be invited to participate in a study group to support them in creating integrated units for their classrooms and will have access to related book kits. These book kits will include fiction and nonfiction literature about that country written in English and in the language of the country along with tape recordings and other resources. Teacher narratives about classroom experiences with these units will be published and will be available to future users of the book kits. A workshop manual along with lists of language resources and literature will also be developed.
--- Innovative Pedagogies ---▲
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This project will facilitate the learning of FL skills by teaching language instructors how to inexpensively design and implement custom FL games using off-the-shelf computer game development tools that permit in-game FL dialogues between game characters and the player, in-game FL texts (such as found documents, journals, maps, and other game clues), and FL puzzles that the player must solve in order to advance the narrative of the game. This project will develop cutting-edge teaching materials and toolkits for FL instructors. Outcomes will include: Language Teacher’s Guide to Digital Game-Based Learning; Spring 2009 workshop/demonstration at the Western Consortium of Middle East NRCs (Spring Language Pedagogy Workshop) on “Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy for Middle Eastern Languages”; publication of the results in leading academic journals in this area and presentations at conferences. Preview and order the guide book at the Fluency in Play website.
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This project will provide professional development for teachers of intermediate-level FL students by introducing them to a systematic way of integrating Global Simulation (GS) into their FL instruction, thereby promoting language and culture learning in their classrooms, engaging them in critical thinking, and preparing them to be global citizens. Working with students of both Turkish and Russian, GS will provide integrated access to authentic input in the target language and culture, allowing students to operate as if they were in the target culture. GS will generate materials such as syllabi, texts, pictures, realia, course materials and rubrics that will be tested in language classrooms and then disseminated through a materials bank. Materials for GS in Turkish will be developed in 2006-7 and fall 2007 and will be piloted in spring 2008; materials in GS in Russian will be developed in summer and fall 2007 and piloted in spring 2008. There will also be a workshop on GS in summer 2008, open to teachers (grades 9-16) of Russian and Turkish across the nation. There will also be a short workshop/demonstration offered at the Western Consortium of Middle East NRCs (Spring Language Pedagogy Workshop) in spring 2009 in partnership with CERCLL, called “Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy for ME Languages”, with projects related to Middle Eastern languages/cultures. There will also be workshops about GS at relevant professional meetings, including the 2010 NCOLCTL conference.
To request a FREE digital copy (PDF) of the Global Simulation Russian handbook (or to receive more information), e-mail Beatrice Dupuy at bdupuy@email.arizona.edu.
Visit the Russian Global Simulation website: http://members.cox.net/helensh/index.html
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This project will annotate different types of texts with multimedia hyperlinks (hypermedia) to facilitate linguistic as well as cultural comprehension of reading texts for language learners. Hypermedia can clarify, explain and illustrate not only the meanings of words and expressions, but also rhetorical, socio/cultural, historical and other concepts embedded in the text. Additional information about certain words or concepts may appear as hypermedia annotations presenting information in nodes and links. Working with Arabic, this project will produce contemporary and authentic sources annotated with the aid of multiple forms of digital media such as text, graphics, audio, and video. Teachers will be able to use these annotated texts as part of their classroom resources. The annotations will be done in 2008-9; in 2009-10 the materials will be used in language classrooms and feedback from teacher and student will lead to improvements in the materials. A website will be constructed in 2009-10 to show the techniques, summarize the research, and provide the materials so that it can serve as a model for other languages. In Spring 2009, there will be a presentation of hypermedia techniques at the Western Consortium of Middle East NRCs (Spring Language Pedagogy Workshop) on “Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy for Middle Eastern Languages”, and in 2010 at the ACTFL conference.
This project will produce a training video for use with the MaxAuthor language software and provide technical support for those using MaxAuthor. This will allow teachers at all levels to develop instructional material in LCTLs. MaxAuthor is a free authoring system created at the Critical Languages Program (CLP) that has enabled instructors for over a decade to produce their own CALL materials for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many other LCTLs. The training video will be streamed through the website maintained by the CLP and technical support by phone and email will be available for instructors who wish to create materials with MaxAuthor. Presentations and workshops using the video will be offered at relevant conferences. Access the training videos.
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The Online Language Environments (OLE) Board is a web based threaded discussion instructional tool that utilizes voice, video and text to replicate the functions of a language lab. OLE is used for, but not restricted to, oral practice, listening comprehension, speaking practice and reading and writing practice. The OLE system can be used to supplement instruction in face-to-face classes as homework assignments, and can be used in entirely distance classes. CERCLL support will provide assistance to improve the technological capabilities and establish the pedagogical strategies of OLE, which has been successfully piloted in French, Arabic, various Indigenous languages and ESL. Specific deliverables for the OLE Board project include templates and pedagogical strategies with examples for Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese; online and print user and instructor documentation; lesson plans and use case scenarios; usability studies for further desired improvement; piloting of multi-institutional usage. OLE will be featured in weekend workshops and/or one-week intensive summer institutes for FL teachers at all levels. We will also provide for the protocols necessary to integrate OLE into course management systems. The OLE Board is being developed as an open-source product that will be available to the wider language instruction community.
Building on the language skills of Spanish speakers (native speakers, heritage speakers, FL/SL learners of Spanish), this project will focus on teaching Portuguese through the early introduction of reading authentic texts. This project will provide a rich source of authentic materials for Portuguese teachers and learners through a website offering both classroom tasks and web-based language learning materials online. By using learning tools available on the web, the tasks will be designed so as to enhance learners’ exposure to authentic input in the target language and will draw learners' attention to form and how structural aspects of the target language (syntax, vocabulary, pragmatics, and morphology) differ from Spanish. Authentic texts, arranged in thematic units, will be compiled and placed online. This project will also develop a wide range of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tasks for learners of Portuguese placed on a website for this purpose. The texts and other online materials will be piloted in language classes and there will be a web discussion board for learners to react to the readings and reflect on the target language. Final outcomes will include a workshop or an institute for grade 9-16 teachers to familiarize them with the web-based products, and presentations at ACTFL and the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP). Access the online interactive modules.
--- Materials and Assessment ---▲
This project will develop an extensive Arabic learner corpus comprising numerous written samples produced by L2 and heritage students, collected over 15 years of teaching. They will be transcribed into a database with cross-referenced categories according to level (beginning, intermediate, advanced), learner (L2 vs. heritage), and genre (description, narration, instruction). The corpus will serve as a source of empirical data for hypothesis testing as well as a resource for developing materials for teaching Arabic. It will be made available through the CERCLL and CMES websites, and will be offered to the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) for dissemination nationally. There will be Spring 2009 workshop/demonstration at the Western Consortium of Middle East NRCs (Spring Language Pedagogy Workshop) on “Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy for Middle Eastern Languages.”
Research indicates that the pedagogical needs of heritage language students are fundamentally different from those of second language learners. The primary goal of this project is to use ethnographic data in order to identify the cultural knowledge that separates heritage learners from second language learners, which then can be used to create an assessment instrument. Fieldwork in the Tucson area will involve ethnographic observations of classroom experiences, individual sociolinguistic interviews with students, and focus groups with teachers. This project will result in the development of a model for assessing heritage language users that incorporates a computer-based instrument tool and the use of ethnographic data as a basis for determining college placement. This model will then be applicable to other heritage language situations, including LCTLs. The model will be disseminated through local workshops for community college and university teachers and nation-wide through the CERCLL website.
This project will produce Volume 3 (Intermediate level), in a series of five books designed to teach Persian to college students or independent learners (the first two volumes were published by Yale University Press in 2005). The new textbook will assist FL teachers of Persian with helping students to read, write, and speak at the intermediate level, through exposing learners to an extended vocabulary and grammatical range in both spoken and written formats, while teaching all levels of formality and informality. As a result, students will progress more rapidly in reading, speaking and understanding intermediate level Persian than in traditional language learning methods. The textbook will be used in teaching intermediate Persian in a draft version and changes will be made on the basis of feedback from the teachers and students before the final version is established. The products will be showcased in a Spring 2009 workshop/ demonstration at the Western Consortium of Middle East NRCs (Spring Language Pedagogy Workshop) on “Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy for Middle Eastern Languages”.
The goal of this project is to introduce students to the variety of writing systems that have been and are used around the world. This project will result in a carefully designed survey of the types of diverse writing systems that different cultures have developed. The instructional materials will provide modules for Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and possibly Korean, and include information on all the writing systems. The two primary target audiences are undergraduate and secondary-school teachers and students. Final products include: individual modules, consisting of introductory notes on the variety of writing systems; lecture notes (available in CD or website format); a student workbook; and a teacher’s manual as an introduction to a language-specific writing system. A compiled version of all the modules and information on other writing systems will also be made available. There will be a Spring 2009 workshop/demonstration at the Western Consortium of Middle East NRCs’ Language Pedagogy Workshop on “Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy for Middle Eastern Languages”, as well as presentations at the Asian Studies Association.
