Presentations by the Spring 2010 BLC Fellows: Audio for all presenters is available below, for both streaming and download.
“Teaching Italian through Theatre: A performative approach”
by Annamaria Bellezza, Lecturer, Italian Studies
Theatre provides the ultimate interactive experience, and as such it represents a powerful, holistic, and comprehensive approach to foreign language teaching, serving as a springboard to upper division literature classes. A dramatic text can be analyzed from a linguistic, cultural, literary, semiotic, philosophical, and theatrical point of view. I focus on the theatrical point of view, and on the fundamental connection between language and emotions.
A .pdf of Annamaria Belleza’s report may be found here.
“Developing a curriculum for Korean heritage language learners through individualized, learner-oriented multimedia projects”
Minsook Kim, Lecturer, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Regardless of whether or not the linguistic status of heritage language learners (HLLs) is attributed to attrition or incomplete learning/contact, the teaching of HLLs requires a curriculum that is tailored to these students’ individualized needs and their divergent linguistic backgrounds, unlike the curriculum for non-heritage learners. Thus, this research aims to report on preliminary results of developing a curriculum that is designed particularly for Korean HLLs using individualized and learner-oriented multimedia projects to meet their needs.
“Cultivating Awareness: Register and Context in First-Year Arabic”
Jason Vivrette, GSR, Comparative Literature
When teaching any language, we are frequently confronted with the problematic question of register: How can we attune students to formal vs. informal, honorific vs. non-honorific distinctions, and in what order should we teach them? Does slang have a place in the foreign language classroom? Should we be teaching a “standard” form of the language, and at the expense of what? Arabic presents a special challenge in this debate given the significant degree of diglossia in the language (i.e., the difference between spoken and written forms). In this presentation, I will demonstrate the importance of introducing students to these linguistic distinctions in the first year of their studies (particularly in the case of Arabic), in addition to discussing strategies for honing students’ “register awareness.”
“New Direction: Blogging in SL/FL Classrooms”
Usree Bhattacharya, GSR, Graduate School of Education
A growing number of educators are utilizing “blogs” in Second Language (SL) and Foreign Language (FL) learning environments, with promising results. In language learning contexts, blogs can serve a variety of tasks, including allowing students to narrativize the language learning process, facilitating discussions of culture, and providing students a multimedia platform with which to practice their language skills. My project seeks to contribute to the developing body of research into blogging practices