Victor Alabi, World Languages & Cultures

This grant was approved to attend the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) at the University of Connecticut, Storrs where Professor Alabi presented on "Expressing Gratitude in Yorùbá Discourse".

Naemi McPherson, East Asian Studies

This grant was approved to attend the ACTFL 2023 Annual Convention and World Languages Expo in Chicago, IL where Professor McPherson presented on her experience of utilizing podcasting in her advanced Japanese course to facilitate students' linguistics skills and voice their opinions regarding their perspectives on social justice issues.

Atsuko Borgmann, East Asian Studies

This campus grant was approved to attend the ACTFL annual conference in Boston in November 2022 where the participant presented in an OPI refresher and renewal seminar.

Liwei Jiao, East Asian Studies

This campus grant was approved for coordinating a professional development workshop with three guest speakers for instructors of Chinese to be held at Brown University in Spring 2023.

Michelle Quay, Esra Ozdemir & Elsa Belmont Flores,  CLS World Languages and Cultures

This campus grant was approved for coordinating a series of events with three guest speakers as part of multilingual project on “Cross-Cultural Currents in Iran,Turkey, and the Arab World.”

Wenhui Chen, East Asian Studies

This campus grant was approved to attend the ACTFL annual conference in Washington, DC, in November 2019 where the participant presented on “Enhancing Learners’ Motivations and Autonomy: Wiki for Language Learning.”

Eva Gomez Garcia, Hispanic Studies

This campus-based grant was awarded for professional development. The funding helped cover the registration costs, travel and accommodation expenses to attend a week-long course at the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. Upon returning, the grant recipient revised parts of the curriculum for HISP 600 Advanced Spanish II  so that the new units and materials are grounded in multiliteracies pedagogy.

Sachiko Hiramatsu, East Asian Studies

This grant was awarded to support time and effort for an instructor to develop grammar lists and vocabulary lists for Japanese 500 (3^rd year). The comprehensive lists are organized according to their functions, and include inflectional forms and sample sentences. It also includes information on where grammar items are placed against the level of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Level) tests.

Naemi McPherson, East Asian Studies

This grant supported the creation of supplementary readings and videos for JAPN 400 in order to enrich the topics found in the currently used textbook with the social justice perspective. The findings were presented in  the panel “Teaching Language for Social Justice in Globalized Japan” at the International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019: Perspectives Conference (Oct.30 – Nov. 2, 2019) in Purdue University Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

Silvia Sobral, Hispanic Studies

This Consortium grant funded the development of instructional units to teach pronunciation in our Spanish basic courses. This grant compensated the awardee in part for time and effort.

Masako Fidler, East Asian Studies

This grant supported the organization of a four part lecture series entitled “Culture within Language, Language within Culture”. The speakers explored issues in language that are fundamental to preparation of language teaching materials, language pedagogy, and classroom practice: vocabulary acquisition and expansion, language transfer (commonly called “language interference”), language variation, and cognitive-literary experience with an unknown language. 

Alla Hassan, CLS World Languages & Cultures

This grant supported a research project entitled "Struggle Along the Nile: Displacement and Diaspora in Modernizing Egypt". This project comprised the production of a full-length documentary, interactive website, and articles designed to introduce the topic of forced assimilation and migration in modernizing Arab states to broader audiences. 

Yang Wang, East Asian Studies

This summer, I would like to compile a learning unit on gender issues in contemporary China that will be used as supplementary materials to the main textbook for the course. The unit will consist of one documentary film, one TV commercial and several reading articles chosen from online blogs, newspapers and magazines. 

Timothy Riker, Language Studies

The goal of this project is to produce bilingual American Sign Language and English content for selected Deaf Studies topics to be used in an Introduction to Deaf Studies course offered online and as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) during summer 2018. By the end of summer 2017, 16 modules of content for the course will be developed. About 8 modules will be selected for use in a MOOC developed as part of Brown University's BrownX initiative. 

Wenhui Chen, East Asian Studies

The purpose of this project is to create a grammar and word usage packet for CHIN 0100, which I will be offering for the first time in fall, 2017. The packet will include forms, pronunciations, English meanings, sample sentences, common error pattern of all grammar points and key words covered in the textbook, and it will emphasize morpheme teaching. The packet will serve as an important reference for students. 

Elsa Amanatidou, Classics

The symposium on genre-based pedagogies took place at Brown University during May 6-7. It was partially funded by the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning to the sum of 10,000 $. The symposium attracted an average of 80 attendees each day, including a large number of colleagues from Brown as well colleagues from all Consortium schools, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago and Yale. As chair of the organizing committee, which consisted of Ercan Balci (Director, CLS), Stephanie Ravillon (French Studies) and Silvia Sobral (Hispanic Studies) I am requesting a subsidence of 2,800 to defray costs associated with honoraria for 7 out of the 9 speakers. The symposium which qualifies for support under the rubric "arranging lectures, lecture series, or local workshops" contributed to the intellectual exchange on campus regarding matters of foreign language pedagogies and classroom practice and promoted the professional development of the Brown faculty who attended.

Wenhui Chen, East Asian Studies

The purpose of this project is to create reading and writing exercises for a new course, CHIN 0350 (Advanced Beginning Chinese), which will be offered to Chinese heritage students in spring, 2017. During the project period proposed above, I will: 1) create reading paragraphs to reinforce vocabulary and grammar points used in the main texts, and create comprehension questions based on each paragraph; 2) create translation exercises. These two types of exercise will help students to improve their reading and writing skills, which usually are the weaknesses of heritage students.

I will create my reading materials using an interdisciplinary approach and CBI to promote the acquisition of language proficiency and higher order thinking skills. I organize the reading topics by the controversial legal issues: middle and high school bullying, Spartan spot training and violence, the Japanese constitution and self-defense forces, and the Yakuza. 

Barbara Gourlay, Language Studies

Keeping up with fast-paced conversations, whether in small talk or job interviews, is often difficult for non-native speakers of English. Teaching them conversational formulae can provide a foundation that will lead to greater fluency and more natural interactions, but non-native speakers also need a set of strategies in order to apply the formulae appropriately. This project will develop a series of in-class exercises and activities adapting improvisational acting techniques to help international graduate students develop their spontaneous speaking skills. 

Elsa Amanatidou, Classics

Modern Greek, like many LCTLs suffer from a chronic lack of published materials which incorporate cultural content in a variety of themes and expressive forms that veer away from folklore and representations of a single "national" culture and homogeneous systems of values and citizenry. This proposal aims to address this dearth, and consequent need, by putting together a map of diverse cultural perspectives and practices in relation to "products", in the Greek speaking world. A sequence of thematically arranged TV commercials accompanied by a course pack of viewing comprehension activities and tasks will offer useful insights into the priorities in the students' L1 societies. Scaffolded activities, beyond the comprehension level, will invite independent research, more in depth analysis and cross cultural comparisons, in the form of talking points and prompts for continuous writing on the importance of certain commodities over others and the branding of human experiences and attitudes with corporate stamps. 

As advertising tends to be reliant on certain narrative patterns which lend themselves to the reinforcement of imperative of subjunctive structures, the commercials in this series will also serve as useful reinforcement and opportunity for further practice of challenging but frequently used linguistic structures. 

Nidia Schuhmacher, Hispanic Studies

HISP 300, Intermediate Spanish's objective is to advance students' proficiency and communicative ability in Spanish as well as to help them increase their understanding of Hispanic cultures. I want students to hear the inner voices within the target culture(s) and see/understand the ways in which these voices express perspectives, self-critique their choices and also view the world outside their geographical and cultural boundaries. To this end, I will supplement the current materials with texts from Quid, a publication from Argentina on urban culture and films by Hispanic directors for four units of study. I will design a set of specific tasks that will engage students in the discussion of culture and develop and strengthen their linguistic and communicative skills.

Yang Wang, East Asian Studies

The goal of this project is to improve the course portfolio for an advanced Chinese language content bridging course, The Changing Face of China and Readings in Chinese Media by adding three new theme-based chapters: "Human Flesh Search", "Off-site College Entrance Exam" and "China's Urban Housing demolition and relocation Wave." Part of the grant will also be used to hire an undergraduate TA to proofread some of the key grammar notes and translation exercises.

Mirena Chirstoff, Language Studies

Listening Comprehension Materials for Beginning/Low-Intermediate Level of Arabic Study I will select 14 video segments containing authentic monologue, advertisements, interviews, and news articles, using primarily the database of video and audio material Arabic Voices (Aswaat 'Arabiyya) for which I have received permission by the author,Professor Al-Batal, and 1-2 - minute long segments of Arabic films and TV shows available on YouTube. For each segment, I will create a listening practice consisting of: 1) pre-listening oral activity (answering questions that induce students' personal experience and educational background, and are relevant to the topic of the segment); 2) listening task for general comprehension (determining the topic, main idea of the segment of oral discourse); 3) close listening (for details of pronunciation, grammar, and style); 4) post-listening activities (in-class discussion, or a relevant written HW assignment). The materials I will create may be put to immediate use in the First-Year Arabic classroom as early as Fall'14.

Lung-Hua Gail Hu, East Asian Studies

I am planning on offering a new course in the spring of 2015, targeting at students who have completed four years of college Chinese. The title of this course is temporarily set to be Advanced Chinese Conversation and I hope to finalize it at the end of summer 2014. Although the project will continue into winter of 2014, the requested funding will be used as summer salary for one month from mid-July to mid-August. The content of this new course will be focusing on subjects that are commonly found in public debates. Previously, when I compiled the course packet for CHIN 0800, I included topics such as human cloning and euthanasia that piqued students' interests and challenged them to think critically and deliver their thoughts using advanced structures and vocabulary. As reflected in a semester-end survey I prepared, CHIN0800 students found this kind of materials thought-provoking and conducive to their desire to further improve their language skills.

Barbara Gourlay

Accurate pronunciation of general academic terminology is essential for internationals studying and teaching at American colleges and universities. While international students and faculty in the US usually understand general academic terminology (written forms, meanings, and usage), they often mispronounce it in face-to-face interactions. Having learned English through reading, this highly literate population relies on one predominant pronunciation strategy: sounding out written word forms. This project will create a sortable spreadsheet/database of general academic terminology, coded for relevant phonological information that is unavailable in ordinary texts, which will be used to develop interactive multimedia exercises to be used for individual study.

Yuko Jackson

The Cahir of East Asian Studies has requested me to develop a new curriculum for first-year Japanese. My objective is to present a new course design for the basic Japanese courses (JAPN0100-JAPN0200) to the department by the end of Fall semester, 2013. Thus I need to dedicate this summer July-August in order to complete this project. Further, I recently formed a group with colleagues from other Ivy League universities to enhance first-year Japanese curriculum. This will be a great opportunity to create much desired horizontal communication with other universities. We are planning to hold the first meeting sometime in August, and I plan to attend.

Shoggy Waryn

This project proposes to create a reference glossary of film terms in English and French, with universal visual examples that can be used and imported easily into any language course in Canvas format. The examples will be culled from clips in YouTube, Google images and other available copyright free materials. The format will be in easily importable content modules, with the column in French editable to be replaced by any other target language.

Miled Faiza

This project will seek to address a serious gap in Arabic pedagogical materials by producing an introductory textbook of Tunisian/Libyan Arabic. The textbook will be task-based and communicative, geared specifically towards the intermediate-level student of Arabic who is preparing for a semester abroad in North Africa.

Hiroshi Tajima

I use an interdisciplinary approach to promote the acquisition of content and language. Also, I organize the reading topics in by the different stages of the life cycle: childhood, college education, employment, love and marriage, children and family, aging, and death.

Shoggy Waryn

ELFE French Exercises are a database of over 800 self-corrected grammar exercises used by all French students enrolled in French language classes at Brown. Purchased over ten years ago, content, interface and navigation have deteriorated dover time and need to be upgraded to new HTML standards. Moreover, new exercises and tools since they are maintained in open access to all teachers. The solution found should be easily adapted to other languages at Brown.

Hye-Sook Wang

Project will enable me to select video clips from Korean TV dramas and films on six most commonly occurring speech acts (thank, request, apology, compliment, refusal, and agreement) in Korean. Each clip will be accompanied by related exercises that I developed based on it. This material is expected to help enhance Korean learners’ sociopragmatic competence.

Elissavet Amanatidou

Modern Greek, like many LCTLs suffers from a chronic lack of materials which incorporate cultural content in a variety of themes and expressive forms and veer away from folklore and representations of a single “national” culture and homogeneous citizenry.  This proposal aims to address this need by creating a map of diverse cultural practices, drawn from television advertisements and messages, accompanied by a course pack of viewing comprehension questions and rubrics, which also invite the students to conduct independent research of their own.

The proposed project aims to address a serious deficit of contemporary, culturally appropriate and relevant material, through the authoring of a 14 unit workbook, which will accompany 18 digitised segments of commercials and “social awareness” announcements, adapted from Greek TV.

Ziad Bentahar

Project will create supplemental materials for teaching North African colloquial Arabic dialect of Darija.

Silvia Sobral

Project will enable graduate students to transcribe and translate a series of video tapes of language classes held at Brown so they can be used as training videos in the course HISP 2900: Theory and Methods of Foreign Language Teaching.

Patricia Sobral

Project will enable project director to conduct interviews with artists in four cities in Brazil. Recorded interviews will be incorporated into DVD to accompany intermediate Portuguese language textbook.

Silvia Sobral

Project will allow project director to transcribe and translate videotape of Spanish language class as pilot for developing procedures for videotaping, transcribing and translating additional foreign language classes. Transcribed and translated videotapes will be used in HISP2900 course – Theory and Practice of Foreign Language Teaching.

Yang Wang

Project will investigate effects of writing prompts that incorporate a reading task on production of Chinese writing assignments for intermediate level students.

Arkady Belozovsky

Funding will enable project director to conduct videotaped interviews with members of the Deaf community in the Southeast New England region. Taped footage will feature a diverse group of Deaf signers and will be adapted for use in fifth semester ASL classes.

Andrew Ross

Funding will enable project director to investigate programs in non-credit language instruction at Yale and Columbia, and to plan for development of a similar non-credit program at Brown for languages not currently taught for credit.

Patricia Sobral

Funding will enable project director to adapt materials (including videotaped interviews) from the high school level Portuguese curriculum of Emma Sokoloff-Rubin and Jeffrey Rubin for second-year Portuguese at Brown. The content of the material focuses on social movements in Brazil and includes afro-reggae music, women’s rights, and the landless movement (MST) – project director will add material on immigration to the U.S.

Hye-Sook Wang

Frog’s Tears and Other Stories: Readings in Korean Culture is a book of folktales, designed to improve learner’s linguistic competence and deepen their cultural understanding in Korean. It consists of 13 best-known Korean folktales, activities and tasks, and related cultural information. It is developed on the Content-Based Language Instruction approach.

Elissavet Amanatidou

This project is part of a larger endeavor to remedy the poverty and unsuitability of existing audio resources; to develop understanding of spoken Greek in a variety of contexts; to allow for a better knowledge and understanding of Greek culture. Aim is to conduct research and record interviews for specimen materials, within the topic of “Higher Education in Greece.” The resulting audio files and accompanying comprehension tasks will serve as a prototype for the textbook I plan to write.

Jane Sokolosky

Project develops curricular materials in multimedia format for intermediate learners of German. Project will produce a website through which students will learn about the history of Germany through culturally significant locations in Germany. Funding will facilitate travel to sites in Germany to interview individuals associated with the sites, to take photographs and to visit museums. Funds will also be appropriated for student help with web design.

Yang Wang

The goal of this project is to provide supplementary materials on sentence connectives that help third-year students of Chinese at Brown to develop cohesive, paragraph-length narrative speeches.

Lung-Hua Hu

This project will serve two purposes: the first one is to provide audio and visual components of my new website for study abroad in China, the second to provide materials for my second new project of developing audio-visual supplementary materials for CI 30/40 (Intermediate Chinese). These materials will include still images and sound files. In order to gather the materials, I will need to make multiple trips within China and Taiwan.

Andrew Ross

Project will survey and evaluate best practices in application of metadata to language instruction resources, will suggest metadata tag content conforming to accepted standards, and will assist the TEACH Project investigators at Columbia University to create taxonomic structures to describe objects within their repository.

Peter Scharf

In 2001, Professor Ramamurti, a respected traditional scholar of Madras, recording his mellifluous recitation of Pariabhadra’s Pascantantra with the intention that I integrate it line by line with the text on The Sanskrit Library website. A qualified Sanskrit student will complete the editing of these digital audio files, mark regions, and save them in archive-quality (AIFF or WAV) format and in web-deliverable (MP3) format. The latter audio files will be made available to students both at Brown and elsewhere at The Sanskrit Library website.

Jane Sokolosky

This grant supports the creation of audio files for beginning and intermediate German. We will make all vocabulary lists available to students both in text and audio form. We have created some files, but our students have requested that we create all files with English and German, and with sufficient pauses to repeat or recall the words. This would be a wonderful repository that could be used in future semesters.

Lingzhen Wang

With funding from this grant I will travel to China in the early summer and purchase recent, feature-length films with scripts, documentaries, TV series and commercials in DVD format for use in a restructured fourth-year Chinese course. Clips from selected titles will be selected for mounting on the WebCT web site for the course, to be streamed using Video Furnace. The scenes will be glossed with the Chinese film script and linked to selected vocabulary items. The selecting, glossing and posting to the web site will take place during summer.

Shoggy Waryn

ELFE is a popular interactive program allowing learners of French to practice specific grammar skills. This project will update ELFE to distribute it over the web while keeping its main features intact. It will also add much needed flexibility to the menus, allowing for customization that will enable teachers to choose which exercises to select for each level of French.

Beth Bauer

The grant will support the services of two graduate students in the Spanish Writing Center for spring semester, 2005.

Yuko Jackson

Project will involve conducting interviews with American students of Japanese who engage in business with Japanese counterparts. Materials in print, audio and video format will be purchased for use in developing lessons and activities in Business Japanese.

Andrew Ross

Project will enable the Language Resource Center to acquire software and equipment for creating, editing and distributing interactive streamed video materials over the web for instructional purposes.

Peter Scharf

The project develops educational software utilizing mechanisms for immediate feedback on exercises using Sanskrit linguistic software.

Meiqing Zhang

The project director is in the revision stages of a textbook with texts and exercises that she is writing for students of Chinese in their fifth year of instruction. While in China she will consult with instructors of Chinese as a Second Language at several universities on aspects of her textbook. She will also consult with authors of literary texts included in the textbook concerning her presentations and interpretations of their work.

Lung-Hua Hu

The project will produce a software program for developing the pronunciation of Chinese vowel sounds. It will feature interactive graphic and audio functions designed for the first-year student, but useful for more advanced learners as well who are interested in honing specific pronunciation skills.

Andrew Ross

Proposal seeks funding to purchase mobile digital recording kits for the Language Resource Center for production of language teaching materials.

Andrew Ross

The Language Resource Center, the Sheridan Center, the Instructional Technology Group, and CLS will organize a workshop and follow-up activities aimed at planning and implementing technological solutions to specific problems in the teaching of languages, cultures and literatures. Participating teams, each consisting of one graduate student and one faculty member, will meet for three days in early June, with a follow-up meeting in late August, and an evaluation module in December.

Beth Bauer

The project will help establish a Spanish Writing Center at Brown which will assist students in intermediate and advanced Spanish courses to improve their writing in Spanish. The Spanish Writing Center will be housed initially in the Language Resource Center will be staffed by three graduate students from Hispanic Studies. It will provide consultations in person, by telephone or via e-mail for 27 hours each week.

Andrew Ross

This proposal seeks funding to equip a digital recording studio in the Language Resource Center for the production of language learning materials. It is envisioned as the first phase in a larger project involving web broadcasting of materials in less-commonly taught languages.

Andrew Ross

The proposal will fund a Planning Workshop for the Language Resource Metadata Project, to be held at Brown University in October, 2003. The Metadata Project is a collaboration between language educators at Columbia University, Dartmouth College and Brown to develop and refine standards for high-quality metadata, along with standards for the format, storage and transmission of digitized language learning materials (such as images, texts, audio and video).

Peter Scharf

The project will produce a comprehensive, digitized list of the principal parts of Sanskrit verbs, based on William Dwight Whitney’s handbook, The Roots, Verb Forms and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language. This digitized list will be entered into a database and utilized for first-year Sanskrit students, for posting on the Sanskrit Library web site, and eventually for use in creating a Sanskrit parser.

Lynne deBenedette

The project will create a separate web site for instructors and students linked to the Dept. of Slavic Languages web site. This site will contain a variety of instructional resources appropriate to several course levels. Funding will enable design of the site, entry of texts and graphics and purchase of copyright permissions.

Merle Krueger

What does it take to manage projects in the application of technology to language teaching? A symposium at Brown University will address the various aspects of this question. Presentations will demonstrate three innovative projects using digital technology in language instruction. The symposium will conclude with a group discussion of the issues raised.