Spring 2007 BLC Fellows
Instructional Development Research Projects
Teaching Chinese Culture and Communicative Discourse through Film
Lihua Zhang, East Asian Languages and Cultures
This project has designed exercises for video clips to be used as scaffolding guiding students to analyze communicative discourse and explore cultural dimensions of discourse pragmatics as well as engage them in interpreting cultural meaning and relating it to their own culture.
Non-Linear Teaching of Japanese Language in Culture: Tatami Rooms as a Cultural Context
Noriko Komatsu, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Through this project, she has explored how a supplementary course in Japanese culture, one grounded in current pedagogy, might support the content of the regular class and help the student towards better language competency.
Exploring the Tensions between Two Systems of Meaning-Making
Michael Huffmaster, German
This project has produced a resource packet of German poems for use in the second year of language instruction. Selected for salient grammatical features, the poems are accompanied by lesson plans that collectively outline a pedagogy grounded in stylistic analysis. This honors the integrity of poetic texts as verbal art while also reinforcing rules of grammar through contrast.
Petersburg Online
L. Mieka Erley, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Petersburg Online is a web-based cultural resource for teachers and students of Russian. The map-based structure allows the student to visualize complex relationships between cultural objects and figures across time. The model of this website may be easily adapted for use in any language department—to complement the language-teaching curriculum, to provide media and text materials in the target language, or to be used for collaborative wiki-style student activities.
Peter the Great’s Journey Abroad: Teaching Genre in the Intermediate Russian Classroom
Anne E. Dwyer, Comparative Literature
This project introduces elements of a literacy-based pedagogy into the second-year Russian classroom. Her project aims to help students develop genre-based reading and listening strategies for dealing with linguistically challenging texts, and also to approach Russian history not as a list of facts, but as a body of competing stories and interpretations—even in the language classrooms.
May 4, 2007
3:00 – 5:00 pm, B4 Dwinelle Hall