Friday, April 12
1:00-4:00 pm Language Resource Center Noyes Lodge   map	OPTIONAL Workshop ... please sign up with registration if interested. Distance Learning Using Video Conferencing (Dick Feldman, Cornell University, Adam Hummel and Nelleke van Deusen-Scholl, Yale University) In this workshop, attendees will first experience a lesson given over videoconference, with the teacher at another university.  Then we will demonstrate and discuss some of the issues in distance learning of foreign languages through videoconference.  These include such technical areas as camera angles and placement, video quality, screen size and shape, audio quality and content sharing.  We will also discuss some of the features that make this sort of DL so effective - the sharing of room space, the dynamism of two groups, and the immediate interactivity.  Attendees will have the opportunity to present short lessons, which will be recorded to take with them.   Accessing and Using the BLC's Library of Foreign Language Film Clips (Mark Kaiser, University of California Berkeley) This workshop will involve instruction on the BLC's Library of Foreign Language Film Clips, which we are making available to other institutions at no charge (but with some caveats concerning copyright). Currently the library contains 14,000 clips in 23 languages. The clips are tagged for the language spoken in the clip, and for descriptors of the linguistic, discursive, and cultural content of the clip. Clips can be annotated and can be played with audio slowed by 50%.
5:00 – 7:00 Language Resource Center Noyes Lodge	RECEPTION

 

Saturday, April 13
8:00 – 8:45 iLR Conference Center in King-Shaw Hall	BREAKFAST and REGISTRATION for directions
9:00 – 9:15 ILR CC 423	INTRODUCTION Dick Feldman, Cornell University Michael Jones, NEALLT President,Swarthmore College
9:15 – 9:30 ILR CC 423	OPENING REMARKS Fred Logevall, Director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies, recently named Vice-Provost for International Relations.
SESSION 1: 9:30 -10:00
ILR CC 423	Erika H Gilson Princeton University A Case for Narrow Reading for LCTLs It is generally accepted that extensive reading on one topic promotes automatic recognition of 'words', basic to comprehension of the text. Krashen further strongly argues that such 'narrow reading' where vocabulary and structures are recombined and recycled, with a minimum of new items introduced, also facilitates language acquisition. How to find such materials for the learners who are at the novice level, has been a major difficulty. After introducing some background on the pedagogical issues, I will present how reading and writing closely complement each other from the very beginning of Turkish instruction at my institution as student writing assignments, collected over several years, provide ample reading opportunities on familiar topics.
ILR CC 425	Mélanie Péron University of Pennsylvania Fashioning a Language Course with Texts and Threads on Canvas In this presentation, I will show how a fifth-semester French course project was put together without relying on a textbook and how Canvas, the open-source learning management system, came to become an integral part of it. Built around the topic of France during the German Occupation, the collaborative task-based project, entitled "Memoirs of the War", enables the students to improve their linguistic and cultural competences as they play an active role in their own and each other's learning process. Canvas is used as the place where the various texts and threads, provided to form a solid backdrop, intersect and help the students make connections.The result is a tight-knit curriculum that promotes students' understanding and self-reliance while achieving the linguistic goals set for the course.
SESSION 2: 10:10 - 10:40
ILR CC 423	Dongdong Chen Seton Hall University What Can a Smart Phone Offer to Learners of Chinese? With the rapid development of mobile technology, more people can afford a smart phone, which can be used for accessing the internet, taking a picture, listening to music, sending and receiving phone calls and email messages. As such, smart phone has become an emerging tool for language education due to its convenience, immediacy, and multimedia effects. A question that is of interest is what a smart phone can offer to learners of a foreign language like Chinese. This presentation attempts to addresses this question by reporting an ongoing project that explores the use of Windows phone for the L2 learning of Chinese tones and writing system. For English-speaking beginners, distinguishing and producing four Chinese tones can be very difficult. Likewise, learning to write Chinese characters is another daunting task because of the logographic characteristics. In this presentation, a focus will be placed on the following specific questions with respect to the above two challenges: (i) what Apps are available to target the learning of tones and writing? (ii) how can they be integrated in the curriculum so as to enhance the learning? (iii) what are the roles of the instructor? (iv) what issues are there for smart phone-assisted language learning? The discussion of these questions will provide implications for those who are interested in incorporating the use of smart phone in their language classroom.
ILR CC 425	Rébaïa Saouli-Corley University of Pennsylvania Interactive Grammar Exercises on Canvas at the Advanced Level Through interactive grammar exercises, students will be responsible for learning, understanding and expanding their knowledge of grammatical rules before or after practicing them in class. My project is comprised of quizzes that enhance students' learning of French grammar. They are presented in the various question formats that Canvas offers: multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blank, and matching. Some of the exercises come with a video component. As quiz formats are varied, students are able to grasp grammatical concepts no matter their learning style. Immediate feedback and continuous assessments are key components in any course, as they provide students to benchmark themselves against upcoming evaluations. With a simple click, students receive immediate constructive feedback on their performance: if their answers are incorrect, Canvas provides explanations of their errors. My students have already noticed how these exercises have a positive impact on their learning.
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SESSION 3: 11:00 – 11:30
ILR CC 423	Ed Dixon and Abeer Aloush University of Pennsylvania Advancing language education beyond the classroom: a community-centered model Heading into their 4th year of delivering live online credit courses in Arabic, Chinese, German, Korean, Haitian Creole, Italian, Polish and Turkish, instructors at the University of Pennsylvania will discuss an evolving model for online language courses that address a growing trend in online education towards community-centered learning. These courses adhere to the goals of communicative language teaching but achieve them beyond the scope of the traditional f-2-f classroom through innovative networked-enhanced pedagogies. Within the context of these new pedagogical opportunities, we will examine their impact on social practice, assessment, student outcomes, professional development and technical support.
ILR CC 425	Grit Matthias Cornell University Me, My-self and Ger-many In this presentation, I will show a students' self experiment in order to find the best way to gain communicative competence through travel. My students and I asked the following questions: How can we have a true culturally enriching experience when going on a trip to a foreign country? How do cultural experiences differ from varying perspectives? How can an experience abroad help us understand both our own culture and other cultures better? What is the best way to learn and appreciate a new culture? In order to gain cultural communication competence we must: 1. Become aware of our own perspectives 2. Become aware of others' perspectives 3. Empathize with their perspectives Communicate these differences Through this project we want to demonstrate a way to accomplish the first three steps through: 1. recording our anticipated expectation before a "cultural obstacle"; that is an event, situation, place; and reflect on our experience afterwards, 2. watching and discussing each others recordings, and 3. after the "cultural obstacle" discussing different or similar experiences, and trying to comprehend the reason for these differences or similarities. Additionally, we publish the recordings of the discussions on the Internet, to demonstrate our process, and provide a model for others.
SESSION 4: 11:30 – Noon
ILR CC 423	Mary Ellen Scullen University of Maryland, College Park Flipping and Blending Elementary French Courses In the past year, I have been invested in "flipping" and "blending" the first and second semester French courses at the University of Maryland. The project began in the fall semester of 2012 with one pilot section of French 103 (a 4-credit first semester course). This spring, the endeavor has expanded to include two pilot sections of French 203 (4-credit second semester course) which are being taught following both the "blended" and "flipped model" as well as all sections of French 103 and 203 which have been flipped, though not yet "blended." The "flipping" involves making students responsible for learning vocabulary, cultural information, and grammatical structures on their own outside of class time, crucially before those items are dealt with in class. To accomplish this, students are assigned pages to read in the textbook (or eBook), video tutorials to watch in MyFrenchLabTM (MFL), and a variety of exercises, both self-correcting and those needing teacher feedback, before each class period. The video tutorials are of two types: grammar tutorials included in MFL that address each structure presented in the lesson and teacher-created videos in French that present the grammar and vocabulary for each lesson. Class time is devoted to having students practice with the language structures they have been learning through a variety of interactive and communicative activities. During class time, students are also free to bring up any questions they may have on the structures they have been learning and practicing outside of class. The "blending" refers to the fact that some face-to-face class time has been replaced by online work that students are expected to complete outside of class. Typically, these 4-credit hour courses meet for four fifty-minute sessions each week on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. During the pilot semester in Fall 2012, the 103 class did not meet on Tuesdays for eight weeks out of the fifteen week semester. This semester, the students in the two pilot sections for 203 are not meeting on Tuesdays at all, apart from two Tuesdays during the semester when they will meet in pairs with the instructor to complete an oral role-play assessment. For each Tuesday that students do not meet with the instructor or their classmates, they are assigned work to do online that may include pronunciation work, proficiency-building activities in listening, reading, and writing, or discussion board activities focused on cultural themes. They are also expected to continue work on the grammar and vocab activities that make up the 'flipped' class. Student and instructor feedback on the "blended" and "flipped" class in the fall was quite positive as based on an end-of-semester survey. The academic results of the students in the pilot section were also on par or better than similar groups taught previously by the instructor. A mid-term evaluation will soon be carried out among all sections of the "flipped" and "flipped and blended" classes this semester. In this presentation, I will present the results of these evaluations as well as explaining in more detail how we have been blending and flipping the first- and second-semester French courses. I will also discuss our future plans as we move forward with this new model of teaching and learning languages.
ILR CC 425	Dick Feldman, Tómas Beviá and Dan Gaibel Cornell University Planning a New Hybrid Platform Like other programs in Commonly Taught Languages, the Cornell Spanish Program has been buffeted by the frequent changes of editions and media/workbook platforms of the publishers. We have finally decided that we can do better ourselves and have decided to create our own materials. But what will be the platform for the online portion of these materials, hosting media, exercises and out-of-class practice of various sorts? In this talk, we will explain our design for a new online learning platform. We will discuss the various features it will have, and what learning tasks students will be able to accomplish with it. The Cornell LRC will then discuss briefly how they plan to create this platform with us and support it.
LUNCH: 12:10 – 1:30	LUNCH
SESSION 5: 1:30 – 2:00
ILR CC 229	Grit Matthias Cornell University Our Definition of Culture - An (inter)cultural Project between German and American Students? In this presentation, I would like to show the progression and development of class projects in order to demonstrate the necessity for a new way of intercultural pedagogy. In addition, I would also like to show the strong need for questioning existing cultural definitions. The projects, I would like to introduce, are all involving learner of German from an American University collaborating with learners of English from a German University. These students collaborate on digital projects with cultural content via computer mediated communication (CMC). Even though Neuner's four key qualities: awareness of identity, distance from one's own identity, empathy, and tolerance of ambiguity, can still be seen as goal of intercultural pedagogy, it has become more and more difficult to apply them in our modern, complex and interconnected world. Therefore I also integrated Breidenbach's concepts into the projects, I would like to present.
ILR CC 423	Natasha Anthony and Malu Benton Hudson Valley Community College Effective Uses of Asynchronous Oral Activities in Online Language Courses While the use of discussion forums, text-based chat, and audio conferences in language courses received much attention in recent literature, oral voice boards have not been investigated to a great extent. The present study based on the survey of 547 community college students enrolled in Spanish, Italian, and Russian courses, interviews with students and instructors, and analyses of the transcribed oral discussion board activities aimed to answer the following research questions: What voice board activities proved to be the most and least effective and why? What instructional conversation strategies were found to be the most and least effective and why? What is the instructor's role in oral asynchronous activities? What are the roles of text and images in those? What is the role of humor? What is the degree of language anxiety in this mode? The study results demonstrated that by both teachers and students, voice board activities were recognized as an excellent venue for the development of language skills. Such aspects of asynchronous oral communication as text and voice, voice and image, types of assignments, assessment, humor, and some others were investigated.
ILR CC 425	Svetlana Korshunova University of Pennsylvania Blogging in the Reign of Russian Literature The goal for this project was to apply new technological tools for teaching a course on classical literary tradition, and, in doing so, to achieve the linguistic ""revival"" of the past via analysis and creative imitation of a literary style to be examined. Every student participated on a weekly basis in a Wordpress.com literary group ""New Arzamas"" (The Society of Friends of Russian Literature) on behalf of a Russian literary critic or writer. A ""historical"" Arzamas Society was a parodic literary group in Saint Petersburg in the beginning of the 19th century. Its members, including Alexander Pushkin, made fun of the ""archaic"" trends of 18th century Russian literature and prepared the ways for the future development of Russian literary language and poetry. Each member of the society had his own pen-name borrowed from a literary work - the device, which my ""literary society"" borrowed from its predecessor. The topics (anonymously discussed) were based on the works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and many others. By the end of the course each student developed not only reading and analytical skills, but rather her creative potential including an ability to imitate her designed ""character's"" style.
SESSION 6: 2:10 – 2:40
ILR CC 423	Luba Iskold Muhlenberg College Facilitating Collaborative Learning in the Cloud This presentation will discuss VoiceThread, a cloud-based application that allows for asynchronous group collaboration using documents, images, audio, and video. The presenter will (1) examine the pros and cons of using VoiceThread; (2) provide examples of tasks for student oral and written expression from Elementary Russian class, as well as examples of collaborative activities among students from two institutions, one in the U.S. and one in Canada, in Russian Culture courses, and (3) discuss findings from Student Surveys regarding the effectiveness of VoiceThread.
ILR CC 425	Sophie Degat University of Pennsylvania Music blogging: creating a free space for students to discover and share authentic cultural material Music is an amazing way to bring idiomatic expression, challenging oral comprehension, and authentic cultural material to the classroom. It is also very engaging and a useful starting point for conversations, as most of us have distinct musical tastes. This is why when teaching elementary French, I usually like to start the lesson with a song or a music video related to or introducing our current topic. It is a low-anxiety warm-up and sets the tone of French language and culture. Why a blog? After a few weeks, I realized that I was picking songs that I personally liked, mostly from my youth, and which may have been somewhat dated. So, when my colleague in Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania, Steve Dolph, showed me the music video blog he had created for his class using Blackboard courseware tool (the Campus Pack Blog), I was thrilled to use his idea in my class. This tool is highly intuitive and enables students to embed music video and format their posts easily. The idea of this blog was to let them pick the music they liked and to present it to their classmates.
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SESSION 7: 3:00 – 3:30
ILR CC 423	Monica Bevia Cornell University Improving Listening Skills in the Medical Spanish Curriculum Through Authentic Video This presentation will explain how I have incorporated a medical themed television series into a second-year Medical Spanish course at Cornell University. The episodes contain essential medical vocabulary, expose students to authentic speech, and provide vast opportunities for in-class activities. I will discuss course design, learning outcomes, technical implications, student feedback, and suggestions for improvement.
ILR CC 425	Joanna Gay Luks Cornell University eComma and Social Reading in English for Foreign Language Learners at the Introductory Levels As a teacher of first and second-year French at an American University, I have long been frustrated by standard approaches to reading. Two assumptions seem to prevail: that at the early stages of FL acquisition, language content should center on concrete subjects and literal meanings (students should not be engaged in metaphorical levels of meaning-making, even when reading a literary text) and that the use of L1 should not be systemically integrated into course work. Given, however, that language is inherently metaphorical and that students necessarily utilize English (or their L1 if not English) as their mode for mediation, my question became, how might language pedagogy fruitfully exploit the use of English for scaffolding linguistic, communicative and symbolic competencies? Consequently, in 2010, when the opportunity to test-pilot eComma, an open source web application under development by UT Austin's Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL), appeared, I jumped at the occasion to provide students with the experience of social reading.
SESSION 8: 3:40 – 4:10
ILR CC 423	Laura Little Connecticut College VoiceThread for Foreign Language Courses The web-based application VoiceThread offers appealing possibilities for foreign language educators, prioritizing as it does audio over textual commenting. Instructors and students can share still images or video to elicit voice comments for structured one-off activities or open-ended projects. Meanwhile, with a relatively simple interface and free user accounts, VT allows instructors and students to ""get to work"" on media projects without frustrating and time-consuming preliminaries. The presentation will share ideas for using this asynchronous collaboration tool across foreign languages to increase students' verbal production, to create a tangible record of student progress, and to enhance culturally-rich and/or content-based courses.
ILR CC 425	Reyes Llopis-Garcia Columbia University Twitter as a Window to Cultural Awareness A successful language course needs, to name a few characteristics, a great approach to grammar instruction, balance in dealing with all input/output skills in the daily class sessions, focus on meaningful student practice, and an authentic take on the target culture. For this last part, it is important to reach out beyond the pages of the textbook and the walls of the classroom. Authentic culture is experienced first-hand, and the Web 2.0 is the means to that end. Spanish is the second language on Twitter all over the world, and in a smaller geographical scale, it is also the second language in importance for New York City after English. Its ample use in the Spanish speaking communities of New York and beyond, makes Twitter an ideal tool to be an integrated part of the language curriculum. The work presented here is a final project on culture awareness used in an intermediate level class at Columbia University. The goal of the project was to get the students in touch with the Spanish cultural scene in New York, and make them interact with newscasters, museums, art galleries, movie festivals, theater and dance events, etc., and to have them report on their findings by exploring the city's rich cultural offerings through their research and participation in said events.
SESSION 9: 4:20 – 4:50
ILR CC 423	Dick Feldman, Slava Paperno Cornell University Teaching Techniques with Two Common Tools Many teachers have a mistrustful relationship with Google Translate, worrying that their students may be relying on it in unproductive ways. In this presentation, we will show techniques to use it for teaching syntax in Russian. The technique will be of interest to teachers of many languages. Secondly, we will show how to tame MS Word and to use its power to make feedback to student writing more efficient. First, we will show how to customize menus and clear the clutter off the screen. The we will show how to create simple text macros that allow very efficient insertion of correction codes into student papers. Finally, we will show a macro that quickly colors portions of text for feedback purposes. These macros can be used to make any written feedback system more efficient. A handout will include the text of the macros.
ILR CC 425	Mark Kaiser UC Berkeley Using Film Clips to Develop Students' Linguistic, Cultural, Semiotic, and Symbolic Competencies This presentation will identify some of the legal, pedagogical, and technological reasons that feature and documentary film has been an underutilized resource in foreign language teaching, and note the changes that have made those limitations less relevant today. Drawing on the 14000 clips in an online database (available to any institution of higher education), I will describe the potential of film clips in the foreign language classroom, in particular focusing on their use to develop students' linguistic, cultural, semiological, and symbolic competencies.
TOUR	Cornell Language Center
DINNER: 7:00 – 9:00
Sumo Hibachi	DINNER (requires extra registration)

Sunday, April 13
9:00 – 9:30	BREAKFAST
9:30 – 10:00 ILR CC 423	Mary Toulouse Lafayette College A Departmental Governance Model: Ensuring a Formative Assessment Cycle Closing the circle, reaching new heights: Language departments regularly develop and implement formal procedures to ensure formative assessments of curriculum and teaching methods. These procedures are used for internal reviews, but also by the local college administration as well as outside agencies, such as Middle States, for accreditation. In this presentation we will discuss the different steps in the assessment cycle used at Lafayette College for its recent accreditation: the informal and formal evidence gathering tools, the use of new technologies, and the role of students and faculty in the process. Open discussion of other models will follow.
10:30 – 11:00 ILR CC 423	Marc Siskin Carnegie Mellon University There Really Is an App for That Because You Made It! The presenter will demonstrate the ease of using LiveCode (formerly Revolution) by creating an application ("app") live in a few minutes during the session. Using LiveCode's English-like scripting and drag and drop objects, he will put together a simple language learning activity for mobile devices. The app can be deployed on iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets – or even computers. The presentation will conclude with exciting news: LiveCode will become an open source development tool in the near future.
11:00 – 11:30   ILR CC 423	Your turn ... an open forum for discussion and questions.
11:30 – Noon TBD A	BUSINESS MEETING
Noon – 1:00 TBD A	LUNCH (requires extra registration)