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Author: Merica McNeil Want to talk about culture with your students, but not sure how to break the ice? As a starting point, it can be helpful to find out about their ideas regarding culture and the basis for these ideas. For example, what experiences have they had encountering other cultures? What challenges did they have? How did they deal with these challenges? What were the results? If they knew then what they know now, would they have dealt with...
Author: Merica McNeil Chinese teacher training was offered by the Confucius Institute at the University of Arizona on Saturday, December 7 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. This event was co-sponsored by CERCLL and attended mostly by K-12 teachers of Chinese working in Arizona. The morning workshop was led by Dr. Wenhao Diao, who recently joined The University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and as an affiliated faculty member in the graduate program...
Author: Justin Parry On November 10–11, CERCLL was sponsoring The Tucson Symposium on Indigenous Knowledge and Digital Literacies. This event was funded by the National Science Foundation’s “Cyberlearning: Transforming Education” program, and involved a partnership with the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) and members of four southwest indigenous communities. The central goal of this symposium was to work with members from small communities as co-researchers investigating the viability of digital games, in this case using ARIS software, as a...
Author: Justin Parry We at CERCLL had something to celebrate this September 11: Dr. Brenda Dann-Messier, Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education and Acting Assistant Secretary of Education, and Dr. Sharon Lee Miller, Director of the Division of Academic and Technical Education, came to a roundtable held in their honor at The University of Arizona on the southwest leg of the U.S. Department of Education’s Back-to-School Bus Tour. The event began with Drs. Béatrice Dupuy and Linda Waugh providing an...
Author: Justin Parry The US Department of Education’s annual back-to-school bus tour is underway! This week-long bus tour has the theme of “Strong Start, Bright Future”, and takes place in the US Southwest states of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California. You can read more about this bus tour on this site. As part of this tour Dr. Brenda Dann-Messier, The Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education and Acting Assistant Secretary of Postsecondary Education of the US Department of Education,...
Innovative Technology in the Language Classroom A professional development workshop for language instructors; open to faculty and instructors from all languages December 14, 2013 at The University of Arizona, Marshall Building Room 490 Session I Fostering Multiliteracies through a Global Simulation: A Curricular Development Project in Intermediate French Dr. Beatrice Dupuy, Faculty of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition Training (SLAT) and Professor of French; Kristen Michelson, SLAT Ph.D. Candidate, Instructor of French, and Study Abroad Coordinator; Elyse...
Author: Justin Parry Do you feel like exploring some online language tools over the summer to practice your own language skills, or want some ideas for the future? Here are five more tools, as a continuation of the first part of ten online tools for language learning: 6. Listen and Write This site features a tool for transcribing various audio sources, including speech and songs from mp3s and YouTube video. Listen and Write currently has audio in 22 different languages...
Author: Justin Parrry There are numerous online tools that can be used in language learning and in second language (L2) classrooms; in fact, it is a focus of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) to find and adapt such tools. From among these many choices, the next two blog posts will introduce ten tools that are available online. These tools can be used in the language classroom to enhance learning, or they could be used by students to supplement their classroom...
Author: Justin Parry Within the sphere of second language teaching, technology has been rapidly growing and being implemented as a tool for motivation and efficiency in the hands of capable teachers. Among the countless online tools available, hypermedia annotations have been shown to be helpful for improving vocabulary learning and reading comprehension. Annotations, or glosses, are usually short definitions or explanations that accompany a text. These usually have appeared in the margins of books, within text, or at the bottom of...
Author: Justin Parry Within the sphere of foreign language teaching in the United States, there are many heritage language learners. The term ‘heritage language learner’ is difficult to define in second language acquisition (SLA). Here is one definition, from The Center for Applied Linguistics (retrieved from http://www.cal.org/heritage/research/faqs.html#2): ” A heritage language learner is a person studying a language who has some proficiency in or a cultural connection to that language through family, community, or country of origin. Heritage language learners have...