Instructional Development Research Projects
Language and Culture in Documentaries by Italian Women Filmmakers
Mara Mauri Jacobsen, Lecturer, Italian Studies
The documentaries I have chosen for my Advanced Italian course present the Italian feminist movement, and/or the lives of Italian women, according to different aspects of the female condition, within the context of Italian culture and history from the Fascist period until today. From the linguistic point of view students are exposed to the live voices of women of different ages, cultural contexts, social classes, and to different dialects and accents. Integrated with essays, articles, and literary selections, these films can allow us to begin exploring, within an interdisciplinary course, the connections between private stories and public history, and questions of gender and modes of representation. I believe the audiovisual materials, when coherently organized around a theme and historical process, can be more effective than individual films for producing linguistic, historical, and symbolic understanding.
Russian Phonetics: Sound and Meaning in Russian Avant-Garde Poetry
Lucas Stratton, GSR, Slavic Languages & Literatures
This project entailed the creation of a website devoted to teaching Russian phonetics in tandem with an ambitious exploration of Russia’s vant-garde literary culture. In my website I draw upon the works of Russian Futurist poets the likes of Vladimir Maiakovsky, Velemir Khlebnikov, Elena Guro, Aleksei Kruchenykh and even the eminent (non-Futurist) poet Anna Akhmatova. Since poetry of the avant-garde compels its speaker to become conscious of the mechanics of word-production, I invite students to heed the impulses of the “avant-garde body” and to cultivate an awareness of the mouth and the embodied subject that are producing—and performing—language. My website encourages students to explore the relation between meaning and sound and to enter the space of new associations and new experiences with language that the avant-garde strove to expand by creating new sounds, new meanings, and new words. Taking the avant-garde’s lead, in my website I aim to impart to students a sense of language acquisition as a creative process.
Teaching Japanese Pragmatic Competence using Film Clips
Wakae Kambara, Lecturer, East Asian Languages & Cultures
This project seeks a new approach in teaching sentence-final expressions of the Japanese language which are pragmatically, but not grammatically, obligatory in communicative interaction. It recommends the use of film clips for teaching such language use in which contexts play an indispensable role. It provides sample exercises using film clips derived from the BLC Library of Foreign Language Film Clips. The Newsletter report is here
Friday, April 29, 2011
3:00 – 5:00 pm
B-4 Dwinelle Hall