uc consortium - university of california, davisuccllt.ucdavis.edu/newsletters/fall05.pdf · uc...

We begin our second cycle with high

expecations.

UC CONSORTIUMFoR LANGUAGE

LEARNING & TEACHING

A s e m i-A n n uA l n e w s l e t t e r p u b l i s h e d At uC dAv i s • vo l. 5, no. 1, FA l l 2005

CONTENTS

2 Events

3 CONGRESSIONAL SUB-COMMITTEEReport

4 WORKSHOPS

6 Campus Reports

10 CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

13 EAP REPORT

PHONE (530) 752-2719 EMAIL [email protected] (530) 754-7152 WEB http://uccllt.ucdavis.edu

Message from the Director

ConsortiumReceivesSecondMajorGrant

A recent survey by the European Union found that over half of its citizens reported

that they speak a second language. In Britain, the percentage drops to 30% and, in the U.S. only 9%, according to a recent U.S. Senate Resolution designating this year as the Year of Languages. Ironically, calls for the internation-alization of business, law, and higher education continue to receive the nod from the American people, although the connection between this goal and knowing languages still seems to elude the general consciousness. How should we prepare our children for this new, more internationalized world? The Consortium is sponsoring a Colloquium on Foreign Language Edu-cational Policy on October 21-22 at the Berkeley campus that will focus on issues like these. Speakers represent all segments of the languagecommunity: MLA, ACTFL, AAAL, and government agencies. The goal of this colloquium is to discuss as openly as possible the challenges we face as the federal government seeks to shape the agenda for foreign language education. The colloquim promises to be a benchmark for language professionals (see details on our website).

This event marks a fitting way to begin the Consortium’s second five-year cycle, but it’s not the only standout. We are pleased to announce that the Consortium has been awarded a prestigious $274,000 grant from the International Research and Studies Program of the United States Department of Education. Over a period of three years the Consortium

will produce and distribute a year-long distance-taught course in Punjabi, a language common to both India and Pakistan and the home language of 1.5 million U.S. citizens. Gurinder Singh Mann, Kapani Professor of Sikh Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will create state-of-the-art instructional materials in the Gurmukhi script of the eastern Punjab for use in both face-to-face and distance learning environments. The Consortium has received an additional $25,000 grant from the South Asian Language Resource Center to produce the materials simultaneously in the Shahmukhi script of the

western Punjab.We also begin this

new cycle with high expectations, having added one more UC campus to the Consortium’s fold with the opening of UC Merced. As

their student body draws more and more from the Central Valley, language issues will play an increasingly important role in the evolution of the undergraduate curriculum.

Given the U.S. Senate’s proclamation concerning the Year of Languages, the Consortium has clearly been doing its part to contribute and inform the UC and the nation at large about language issues. In addition to the colloquium, the Consortium will sponsor its third biennial second language research conference April 21-23, 2006 at UCLA.

UC CONSORTIUM FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING & TEACHING2

Grants ProgramCall for Proposals 2006

Deadline: February 17, 2006 Notification:Mid-March 2006 Tenure of Grant:July 1, 2006-June 30, 2007

Check website for application forms and information

http://uccllt.ucdavis.edu/grants.cfm

October 20 Fall Meeting of the

Steering Committee UC Office of the President

October 21 – 22 National Colloquium on U.S.

Language Educational Policy UC Berkeley

December 1 Abstract Deadline for

Spring Conference

February 17 Deadline for Consortium

Grant Applications

April 21 Spring Meeting of the

Steering Committee UCLA

April 21 – 23 3rd Conference on Theoretical

and Pedagogical Perspectives UCLAJune TBA: 6th Annual Summer Workshop TBA

UCCLLT

cons

orti

um e

vent

s ca

lend

ar

In AppreciationThe Consortium thanks the following outgoing Steering Committee members for their service:Rutie Adler, Bruce Anderson, Magda Campo, David Fahy, Shoichi Iwasaki, Jurgen Kempff, John Moore, Thomas Scanlon, Sung-Ock Sohn.

The Consortium welcomes the following new Steering Committee members:Virginia Adan-Lifante, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Chengzhi Chu, Thomas Hinnebusch, Ruohmei Hsieh, Usha Jain, Mariam Lam, William Nickell, Dwight Reynolds, Rahim Shayegan, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku.


Dan Davidson, member of the Consortium Board of Governors,

is the President of the American Councils for International Education and a Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College. On April 14, 2005, he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs, seeking continued assistance for educa-tional programs in South East Europe and Eurasia. The following are excerpts from Davidson’s statement.

“Two years ago, the senior career U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Jim Collins, appeared before this Subcommittee to speak on behalf of the importance of assistance for international training and

educational activities in Eurasia to our national interest and future security. ‘These activities,’ he noted, ‘are building a new base for relations with former adversaries in the countries that once made up the

Warsaw Pact and the USSR.’ Today, the central issues of nuclear non-proliferation and the war against terrorism dominate

ConsortiumGovernorAddressesCongressionalSubcommittee

government-level relationships with the region.

Since 2003, our region has experienced the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia (whose President is a former Muskie Fellow) and the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine. At the same time, however, there have been disturbing counter-trends in the reassertion of authoritarian policies and repression of basic freedoms in Belarus and other nations across the region. Clearly, much remains to be done, if further support of democratic freedoms as well as economic and social reform is to be achieved. One indication of the urgency of maintaining national focus on the region is evident in the joint statement issued by Presidents Bush and Putin in Bratislava on February 24 of this year. The statement calls upon both countries to re-double their efforts at expanding cooperation in science and education and people-to-people contacts, which have retreated to levels that are now well below 50 percent of those achieved in 1998.

I recommend that the U.S. further explore replication of some of the priorities and program models that have functioned well in the NIS, especially in Central Asia, in Afghanistan, South Asia, and other parts of the Muslim world. I would like to remind Subcommittee members that the fastest growing segment of the population in South East Europe, Russia, and the states of Central and South Asia are Muslim: 70 million in Eurasia, 240 million in South Asia. These

populations constitute a substantial percentage of the worldwide Muslim groups identified as a priority for U.S. public diplomacy and foreign policy focus.

There is particular need for programs focused on the support of teachers and those who train them, such as Teaching Excellence Programs. Professional development of higher educational faculty (“like the Junior Faculty Development”), curriculum development, and support of standardized educational testing can contribute greatly to creating much needed new capacity in the domestic educational systems of many of these nations. All of these programs include a focus on ethnic diversity, access to educational opportunity, and sustained and affirmative effort to reach beyond the traditional elites affected by many U. S. programs. Investments in the professional development of teachers can produce a powerful multiplier effect for student learning in the schools.” 1

Dan Davidson

The central issues of nuclear non-proliferation

and the war against terrorism dominate government-level

relationships.

NATIONAL COLLOQUIUM ON U.S. LANGUAGE EDUCATIONAL POLICYOctober21-22,2005Presenters: Jayne Abrate, Mahmoud Al-Batal, Roger Allen, Richard Brecht, Donna Christian, Dan Davidson, Kees De Bot, Rick Donato, Janice Jensen, June Phillips, Tim McNamara, Sally Magnan, Mary Louise Pratt, Elaine Tennant, Terrence Wiley

PaperswillbepostedtotheConsortiumwebsitehttp://uccllt.ucdavis.edu


TwoWorkshopsforUCFaculty

A Heritage Language workshop was held on April 29 – May 1, 2005 at UCLA as part of a continuing series of UC heritage-related symposia. Participants came from UC campuses as well as other local institutions. Guest speakers were: Maria Carreira (CSU Long Beach) and Kimi Kondo-Brown (University of Hawaii). UC presenters were Olga Kagan, Kathleen Dillon, Linda Jensen, Gyanam Mahajan, Georgiana Farnoaga, and Yenna Wu. The workshop was sponsored by the Consortium and organized by the UCLA Language Resource Center.

A Content Based Instruction (CBI) workshop, sponsored by the Consortium, was held on June 25– June 27, 2005 at UC Davis. The purpose was to showcase innovative language curricular efforts by UC faculty in German, Japanese, and Spanish. Guest speakers included Glenn Levine (Irvine), Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku (San Diego), and M. Victoria González-Pagani (Santa Cruz). Participants came from Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. Future CBI workshops will be offered to address the needs of additional foreign languages.

UC Irvine was the site of a two-day meeting on May 24-25. The first day was devoted to a training workshop, with the

goal of developing an informed, principled approach to creating a heritage curriculum in Vietnamese. Professor Glenn Levine (UC Irvine) and Dr. Olga Kagan (UCLA), both members of the Consortium Steering Committee, were the workshop present-ers. Levine discussed developing a pedagogy that validates and enriches the learners’ own ethnolinguistic identity/identities. Kagan offered perspectives on the theory and practice of teach-ing Vietnamese as a heritage language. On the second day, the

ConsortiumConvenesVietnameseFaculty

Vietnamese faculty worked to design instructional goals and strategies for each level of instruction at UC and to articulate UC campus instruction with the UC Education Abroad Program in Hanoi. Participating in the workshop were UC faculty mem-bers: Kimloan Hill (UCSD), Mariam Beevi Lam (UC Riverside), Trong Nguyen (UC Davis), Tin Pham (UCLA), and Bac Hoai Tran (UC Berkeley). EAP participants were Hanoi site director, Gerard Sasges, and Dr. Vu Duc Nghieu, Vice-Rector, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi. 1


High school teachers of Spanish met at UC Davis for the third and final workshop provided by the

Consortium with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. UC faculty Francisco Alarcón, Cristina Martínez-Carazo, Adelaida Cortijo Ocaña and Juan Poblete led discussions, and M. Victoria González-Pagani provided hands-on training in build-ing a web-based curriculum. The goal of the workshop series was to create an Advanced Placement Spanish Literature curriculum for heritage learners that would inaugurate literature instruction at the ninth grade level and distribute it over four years. During fall 2005, the teacher participants will continue to populate the course website with new materials and classroom activities as they are developed and pilot-tested. 1

SummerAPSpanishWorkshopConcludes

NEH


campus reportsBERKELEY

ExecutiveDean,CollegeofLettersandScience George Breslauer

InterimDeanofArts&Humanities: Anthony J. Cascardi

SteeringCommitteeRepresentatives:

Usha Jain, Senior Lecturer in Hindi

Claire Kramsch, Professor of German; Director of the BLC

Sam Mchombo, Associate Professor of Linguistics

RalphHexterVacatesPostReplacing Hexter, who has become President of Hampshire College in Masschusetts, are George Breslauer and Anthony Cascardi.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of Social Sciences, George W. Breslauer has been a professor at UC Berkeley since 1971. Author or editor of 13 books on Soviet and Post-Soviet politics and foreign relations, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Professorship in 1998 for comprehensive excellence in scholarship, teaching, and service. He remains Dean of Social Sciences while serving as Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science.

Interim Dean of Humanities Anthony J. Cascardi was educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1980. Since then he has taught at Berkeley, where he holds appointments in the Departments of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish. Cascardi is a specialist on Cervantes, on the relations between literature and philosophy, and on aesthetics. He is the author of 6 books and more than100 articles and currently serves as Vice-President of the International Society for Aesthetics. At Berkeley he holds the Margaret and Sidney Ancker Chair.

The BLC Lecture series is sponsored by the College of Letters and Science and by Berkeley’s eight National Resource

Centers under a Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education

Berkeley Language Center * B-40 Dwinelle Hall #2640 *Berkeley Language Center * B-40 Dwinelle Hall #2640 *

http://blc.berkeley.eduhttp://blc.berkeley.edu

(510)642-0767 x10(510)642-0767 x10

September

23

Friday

3-5pm

October

7

Friday

3-5pm

FFFaaallllll 222000000555

LLLeeeccctttuuurrreee SSSeeerrriiieeesss

Ingrid PillerProfessor and Chair English Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of English as a Global

Language English Department Basel University, Switzerland

“Ladies from the Philippines are more compatible with American gentlemen

than American women”:

The Linguistic Construction of Identities on Mail-order-bride Websites

November

18

Friday

3-5pm

December

2

Friday

3-5pm

"Grammar & Politics in the Language Classroom"

Panel:Sonia Shiri, Arabic, Moderator Jaleh Pirnazar, Persian

Sarah Roberts, French Sam Mchombo, African Languages

Hatem Bazian, Arabic Yoko Hasegawa, Japanese

BLC Fellows ForumNikolaus Euba, Olya Gurevich, David Malinowski, BLC Fellows

Sarah Roberts, BLC Research Associate

Instructional Development Research Projects

All

Lectures

in

370

Dwinelle

Michael GeislerDean of Language Schools and Schools Abroad, Professor in Linguistics and Languages

Middlebury College, Vermont

“Metaphors to Die For: Towards a Rhetoric of National Symbols”

DAVIS

InterimDeanofHumanities,Arts,andCulturalStudies,CollegeofLetters&Science: Patricia Turner

SteeringCommitteeRespresentatives:

Moraduwan Adejunabi, Associate Professor of African American & African Studies; Chair of African American & African Studies Program

Carlee Arnett, Assistant Professor of German

Chengzhi Chu, Chinese Language Program Coordinator

Bruce Anderson, Assistant Professor of French, has succeeded Carlee Arnett as the director of the Second Language Acquisition Institute (SLAI).

Carlee Arnett, Assistant Professor of German, outgoing director of the SLAI and member of the Consortium Steering Committee, represented the SLAI at the Fall Chancellor’s Conference on Internationalization, held at Lake Tahoe. The conference focused on efforts to make UC Davis more international through expanded research and study-abroad opportunities.


campus reports

Professor of English Jonathan Post became UCLA’s interim dean of humanities on July 1, 2005. Dean Post’s research interests are 17th-century poetry and modern lyric poetry. He is the founder and administrator of UCLA’s Shakespeare Stratford Program, a summer program held in England. Dean Post has been on the UCLA faculty

IRVINE

Dean,SchoolofHumanities: Karen Lawrence


Elizabeth Guthrie, Senior Lecturer in French; Director of the French Language Program

Ruohmei Hsieh, Chinese Language Program Coordinator

Glenn Levine, Associate Professor of German; German Language Program Director

Introductory Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian (Farsi) are being offered this year at UC Irvine. This is part of a concerted effort by the School of Humanities to offer a greater number of languages, and to integrate the study of these languages into the mission of the humanities.

LOS ANGELES

InterimDeanofHumanities,Jonathan Post


Thomas J. Hinnebusch, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and African Languages; Associate Director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center

Olga Kagan, SOE Lecturer in Russian; Director of the Language Resources Center

Rahim Shayegan, Musa Sabi Assistant Professor of Iranian

since 1979. He was chair of the English Department in 1990-93 and acting dean of humanities in 1992-93.

UCLA, as a member of a consortium including Bryn Mawr College, University of Maryland at College Park, Middlebury College, and the American Council of Teachers of Russian, has been awarded a NSEP /AED Russian Flagship Program. The program’s mandate is to raise student proficiency to the superior level. Olga Kagan, LRC director, and Anna Kudyma, of the UCLA Slavic Department, will create the curriculum for the program’s UCLA component, which will admit its first flagship students in the winter quarter of 2006.

The UCLA Persian language program and the University of Maryland, College Park have been awarded a joint National Flagship Language Initiative Program for Persian. UCLA will create a summer immersion program for flagship students, supervised and directed by the Director of Iranian Studies in the Department of NELC, and UMD will offer a program during the academic year. The UMD/UCLA Flagship Program anticipates admitting its first student cohort in 2007.

A graduation ceremony was held on June 7, 2005 for the first cohort of the UCLA Korean Flagship program. Seven students completed the year-long intensive program

University of California, Los Angeles

April 21-23, 2006

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Michael McCarthy

University of Nottingham, UK/Pennsylvania State University"Fluency Revisited: Flow and Confluence"

On April 23rd, Michael McCarthy will also lead a half-day workshop"The Contribution of Spoken Corpora to Language Pedagogy"

We invite submissions for presentations from scholars in all disciplines who are involved in research on

second language learning and teaching:

• Literature and Culture in Language Study

• Language Learning for the Heritage Student

• Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Second-Language-AcquisitionTheory

• Innovative Classroom Applications of Second-Language-Acquisition Theory

Please see the UC Consortium Website for details concerning submission of abstractshttp://uccllt.ucdavis.edu/

Note to lecturers, faculty, and graduate students affiliated with the University of California: There will be

limited funding provided by the UCCLLT for travel and lodging expenses for both participants and attendees.

Sponsored by the UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching: http://uccllt.ucdavis.edu/,The UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching is a system-wide initiative designed to make the most effective useof UC's vast linguistic resources and expertise. The consortium fosters collaboration among and across the language programsat the UC campuses with an eye to increasing student access to language study through a combination of the best classroompractices, technological enhancements and study and work-abroad programs.


MERCED

campus reports

Dean,SchoolofSocialSciences,HumanitiesandArts:

Kenji Hakuta

SteeringCommitteeRepresentative:

Virginia Adan-Lifante, Lecturer in Spanish; Coordinator of Spanish Language Instruction

The University of California, Merced started classes on September 6, 2005. On its inaugural semester, UCM is offering Spanish Language and Culture courses at the lower and upper division levels, as well as courses on Spanish and Chicano literature.

LOS ANGELES – continued

and will enter Korea University in Seoul this fall for a year’s study.

The Eighth Annual UC Slavic Under-graduate conference was held on Saturday, May 21, 2005 at UCLA. The UCLA Slavic Department organized and hosted the conference. Larry McLellan (UCSB) coordinated the program of events, and other UC faculty and graduate students chaired panels. Twenty-six undergraduates from UC campuses and Pasadena City College read papers on topics including culture, history, literature, Central Europe, and issues concerning the former Soviet Union.

DeanFocusesonLanguagesGabrielle Spiegel, who was Dean of Humanities in 2004-2005, gave an address to the Humanities Graduation Ceremonies in June. She emphasized the rich and diverse offerings of some 63 different languages at UCLA, “ranging from Arabic to Armenian, Spanish and Sanskrit, Turkish and Tagalog, French and Finnish, Russian, Hebrew, German, Afrikans, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese, as well as the ancient languages of Greek and Latin and a host of others it would take far too long to list.” Dr. Spiegel posed the question “Why are the Humanities important?” The following are excerpts from her address. The Consortium thanks Professor Speigel for permission to print them.

“A partial answer from an unexpected place crossed my desk last week: a Call to Action for National Foreign Language Capabiliities, issued by the Department of Defense, which took the form of a White Paper issued by a gathering in 2004 of leaders from government, industry, academia and language associations. The Call to Action suggests that in all the fields noted, linguistic and cultural competency is as critical to the future of the country as investment in science was believed to be after the Russians launched its first sputnik in 1957, an event that catalyzed investment in scientific education and

led to a sustained movement of scientific study and discovery over the course of the last half century. So deeply does the government believe in the validity of this analogy that they have named this Call for linguistic and cultural competencies “the Sputnik moment” in Humanistic studies. I have always believed that the great and abiding task of the humanities is, precisely, to cultivate appreciation for the immense variety of the ways that peoples and societies live, think and create. In a compelling sense, nothing makes the case more powerfully for the absolutely crucial place of the Humanities in the University, in society, and in the global community.

As the rest of the world struggles to comprehend and learn to tolerate difference and diversity, you, our magnificent Humanities students at UCLA, whose own cultural hybridity as heritage populations living in Los Angeles, perhaps the world’s most ethnically diverse city, mirrors that diversity in its composition, have already arrived at the edge of the future. The linguistic and cultural competencies that you have worked so hard to attain as students in the Humanities at UCLA is a growing fact of the present world, and to understand it in all its guises and dimensions is to acknowledge diversities of every kind as a central characteristic of contemporary global societies.”

Keynote Presenter Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. (Harvard University) and Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey looked out over an audience of approximately 4,500 people on opening day.

UC President Robert Dynes and the former UC President Richard Atkinson applaud the opening of UC Merced .


RIVERSIDE

InterimDean,CollegeofHumanities,Arts,&SocialSciences:

Joel Martin


Mariam Beevi Lam, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Vietnamese

Theda Shapiro, Associate Professor of French

Catharine Wall, Assistant Professor of Spanish

SAN DIEGO

DeanofArtsandHumanities:Michael A. Bernstein


Grant Goodall, Professor of Linguistics; Director of the Linguistics Language Program

Stephanie Jed, Associate Professor of Literature

Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Director of the Japanese Language Program

campus reports

Historian Michael A. Bernstein, a well- known authority on 20th century Amer-ican economic history, has been named

dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities. Bernstein served as chair of UCSD’s Academic Senate in 2001-02 and previously as chair of the Department of History. An award-winning teacher, Bernstein earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Yale University. His research and teaching interests focus on the economic and political history of the United States, macroeconomic theory, industrial organization economics and the history of economic theory.

UC San Diego is offering a class this quarter in Langue des signes française (French Sign Language). This is the first time that this language has been taught at a university in North America. It is targeted primarily at students who have already finished the basic sequence in American Sign Language.

Gurinder Singh Mann is developing a year-long distance-learning course in Punjabi with the support of the grant procured by the Consortium from the U.S. Department of Education International Research and Studies Program.

Mann is Kapany Professor of Sikh Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His teaching interests range from religion and society in the Punjab, and learning of Punjabi as a foreign language. His publications include Sikhism (Prentice Hall, 2004), The Making of Sikh Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2001), and entries on Sikhism in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1999). Mann is the founding director of the Summer Program in Punjab Studies in Chandigarh and is presently involved in building a Center for Sikh and Punjab Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

SANTA BARBARA

Dean,CollegeofLetters&Science,DivisionofHumanities&FineArts: David Marshall


Dorothy Chun, Professor of German and Applied Linguistics

Timothy McGovern, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese; Director of the Spanish & Portuguese Language Programs

Dwight C. Reynolds, Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature

Gurinder Singh Mann

campus reports


UCCLLT

BIENNIALCALLFORNOMINATIONS

CONSORTIUMAWARD2006TOHONORMAJORCONTRIBUTIONSTO

LANGUAGELEARNINGANDTEACHINGATUC

All full-time UC language faculty members are eligible.

To nominate a colleague, please submit to a Consortium steering committee

representative a one-page letter describing the candidate’s achievements.

The Consortium will post detailed instructions on its website.

Dr. Jean Schultz, SOE Lecturer in French at UC Santa Barbara

was the first recipient of the award in 2004.

SANTA CRUZ

The Language Program boasts a new website http://lang.ucsc.edu.

Dr. Denice Denton was appointed chancellor in spring 2005. Dr. Denton comes from the University of Washington, where she served as engineering dean since 1996.

Dean Lease and Chancellor Denton demonstrated strong support of the Language Program by rescinding cuts planned for 2005-2006. A Committee on Languages, comprising members from all divisions, is to convene this Fall and evaluate the scope and scale of language offerings for the future.

InterimDean,Humanities:

Gary Lease


Guilia Centineo, Lecturer in Italian

M. Victoria González-Pagani, SOE Lecturer in Spanish

Gildas Hamel, SOE Lecturer in French; Chair of the Language Program

William Nickell, Lecturer in Russian

Last spring, as every year since 2001, lecturers under the direction of Miriam Ellis and Sakae Fujita presented plays in five languages for the UCSC International Playhouse. The languages featured this year were Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. The performances included medieval traditional pieces, classical works of the 17th century, modern plays from the theater of the absurd, and original works written by faculty and students. DVDs of several of the programs are available.


Previous articles in this Newsletter have addressed the issues involved in assur-

ing that UC’s foreign language offerings abroad integrate with the campus-based language programs. In this article we will consider how EAP’s Language and Culture offerings utilize the local environment to enhance the language learning process. We will not be addressing immersion or direct enrollment programs in this article, only those which focus on intensive lan-guage learning as the primary goal of the program.

The true measure of a successful language course abroad is how effectively that course integrates the time that students spend outside of class in the local community with the learning that takes place in the classroom. Left to their own devices, students will naturally tend to treat the location in which they are living abroad as a playground for doing all those things that they haven’t been able to do at home, from eating and drinking, to site-seeing and traveling, all the while usually speaking English. Unless, that is, the program itself structures the students’ time outside of class in meaningful ways to ensure that the students activate their foreign language skills.

Activation is the key word in this enterprise. It is one thing to tell students they should try not to use English or to organize excursions to introduce them to the cultural context of the language they are learning; it is quite another to create situations that oblige them to use the language in their daily activities – to make communication in the language an integral part of the acculturation process. A whole range of possibilities exist for doing this, and EAP utilizes many of them; but it has experimented with one in particular which it has found most productive. That is the requirement that students complete a project for credit as part of their academic program, which requires active use of the language for its successful completion. These are undergraduate research projects where the research is conducted primarily by interviewing locals on a subject or otherwise working with the local population in situations where English

would not be of much help. Library or web research is kept to a minimum on the grounds that reading is a more passive skill than being obliged to engage in active communication situations with native speakers.

These projects are intentionally designed to be fun, so the students will enjoy doing them, but at the same time they require serious research on a topic worthy of academic credit. The UC study centers that oversee these projects present the students with a long and varied list of topics from which to choose and provide them with tutors to help them define and organize their research. At the end of the program students must submit a serious paper in the foreign language and present

an oral “defense” of their project before the entire group. Thus they activate both their written and oral skills.

This particular type of activity has proven very successful at the second-year level in France, where experience has demonstrated unequivocally that students are capable of doing meaningful research of this kind in the foreign language; it is about to be applied in Italy as well. The approach has, of course, to be modified when used at this level with other more challenging languages, including German and Russian, and certainly at the first year level in any language. The new intensive language program in Potsdam, for example, also requires students of second-year German to pursue a project where the research has to be conducted as much as possible in German, but the paper submitted for credit may be written in English. In Siena, EAP has mounted a very successful service-learning program for students with anywhere from zero to two years of Italian. Over fifty percent of the students on that program volunteer for work with organizations throughout the community where they need to

speak Italian to communicate effectively and fulfill their assignments. Students complete at least thirty hours of service, and the paper they write may be in either Italian or English depending on their language level.

Next year EAP will be moving intensive second-year instruction in Italian from Siena to Padova, where the project approach perfected in France will again be applied, with all students reporting on their research in Italian. In this case there will be an added dimension of integration, this time specifically with the academic culture of the local university, since moving the program to Padova is intended to encourage as many students as possible to become familiar with the university community and extend their stay to include a semester of study in regular university courses.

Yet another type of cultural integration is being designed into EAP’s new first-year French program in Paris. In this case a committee of faculty from a number of UC campuses are working actively with EAP to construct a curriculum that is not only well articulated with the campus French programs but also includes a well-organized series of cultural activities fully integrated with the language modules, using Paris as a living learning laboratory. A similar process is underway with the new first-year Spanish program slated to begin this summer in Madrid.

EAP has long been at the forefront among professional study abroad organizations in maximizing the use of the foreign environment for language learning purposes, not only in terms of curricular design, but also in such areas as student housing, which can have a major impact on the quality of the foreign language experience. Thus, homestays are required on the language and culture program in Lyon and are strongly encouraged on the one in Bordeaux. While there is no one best way to achieve the desired integration, and while it is not always possible to create the optimal situation in every location, EAP can set goals and continue to strive towards this ideal in language programming abroad. 1

Activation is the key word in this

enterprise.

TheOtherSideofIntegrationonStudyAbroadPrograms:IntegratingwiththeLocalCultureContributed by Rodney B. Sangster, Regional Director and Language Coordinator at UC’s Education Abroad Program and member of the Consortium Steering Committee.

University of California220 Voorhies HallDavis, CA 95616-87980782

UCCLLTSteeringCommitteeVirginia Adan-Lifante, MercedMoradewun Adejunmobi, DavisBruce Anderson, DavisCarlee Arnett, DavisMariam Beevi Lam, Riverside Giulia Centineo, Santa CruzChengzhi Chu, DavisDorothy Chun, Santa BarbaraGrant Goodall, San DiegoBetty Guthrie, IrvineGildas Hamel, Santa CruzThomas Hinnebusch, Los AngelesRuohmei Hsieh, IrvineUsha Jain, BerkeleyStephanie Jed, San DiegoOlga Kagan, Los AngelesClaire Kramsch, BerkeleyGlenn Levine, IrvineTimothy McGovern, Santa BarbaraSan Mchombo, BerkeleyWilliam Nickell, Santa CruzMaría Victoria González Pagani, Santa CruzDwight F. Reynolds, Santa Barbara

[email protected]

UCCLLTBoardofGovernorsJ. Jeffrey Assaf,

Bear, Stearns and Co.

Dan Davidson, American Councils for International Education

Neil Granoien Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center

Kenji Hakuta University of California, Merced

Ralph M. Ochoa, Ochoa Law Firm

Paul Nelson Sun Microsystems

Rodney Sangster, EAPRahim Shayegan, Los AngelesTheda Shapiro, RiversideYasu-Hiko Tohsaku, San Diego Catharine Wall, Riverside

UCCLLTStaffRobert Blake, Director (530) 754-7153 [email protected]

Kathleen Dillon, Associate Director (530) 754-9727 [email protected]

Karen Callahan, Assistant Director (530) 752-2719 [email protected]

Alison Hildebrandt, Administrative Assistant (530) 752-8466 [email protected]

Hai-Meng Yang, Web Developer [email protected]

&

UC CONSORTIUMFoR LANGUAGE LEARNING TEACHING

UCCLLTUnder the direction of Professor Robert Blake (UC Davis), The UC Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching is a system-wide initiative designed to make the most effective use of UC’s vast linguistic resources and expertise at a time when foreign

language enrollments are increasing dramatically. The consortium fosters collaboration among and across the language programs at the UC campuses with an eye to increasing student access to language study through a combination of the best classroom practices, technological enhancements, and EAP programs.

uc consortium - university of california, davisuccllt.ucdavis.edu/newsletters/fall05.pdf · uc...

Documents