NEALL 1999

Michelle Sims, Computer Lab Coordinator, and Robin Clouser, Professor of German, will describe changes in the way they work and teach as a result of a transformation to computer-enhanced pedagogy. Michelle will describe her transition from part-time technical assistant to director of a computer lab for languages. Robin will explain how computers can make intermediate German fun.

This presentation will walk the audience through two web sites designed for the advanced student of Spanish: one dealing with a famous sonnet by Garcilaso de la Vega (1503-1536), and another covering a fragment from the Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Both sites constitute a tool for the students to better grasp some of the difficulties of reading old texts in a second language: reading comprehension, the rhetoric of poetry and narrative, questions of genre, etc. The web pages give ample freedom for the users to navigate the site according to their own needs and offer several self-check exercises to further review their knowledge.

Created by De Bao Xu (Associate Professor of Chinese, Hamilton College) and Hong Gang Jin (Associate Professor of Chinese, Hamilton College), an easy use template for multimedia exercises will be presented by Megan Manchester, a Hamilton student who attended the Middlebury Tech-training Program. With a few transparent clicks, a language teacher can create systematic multimedia exercises for his/her own students. Build-in activities of the template include vocabulary exercises, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, grammar and culture notes, video close-caption, and student on-line recording comparison.

My presentation focuses on pre-listening activitivites used in the Kiswahili reading and listening modules. In the listening module, visuals with clickable hotspots are used to introduce and reinforce vocabulary items relevant to the topic in focus. Students answer a series of questions based on the vocabulary presented and they receive immediate feedback. In the reading module, each selected vocabulary item has been hyperlinked to a visual or an English glossary, a Kiswahili synonym, and an explanation on usage. Comprehension questions with immediate feedback are also given.

This paper is both an empirical analysis of web-based instruction and a reflection upon its relevance in the upper-level French class, with focus on the definition of the kind of proficiency that instructors may wish for students at this level and for this particular performance.

These on-line tutorials for first and second-year German courses combine text, graphics and sound to provide students with multi-media conversation practice outside of class and lab times. They are not limited by copyright or site license, can easily be changed or updated without any expense or need to collect and redistribute materials, and fill the need for conversation practice materials.

Interactive WWW pages may be enhanced using simple JavaScript utilities integrated into an HTML page. Several utilities developed at SUNY Cortland and used in French and Spanish culture pages for student feedback and response submission will be provided and demonstrated. We will give special attention to solutions for common FL character problems from the point of view of the non-programmer.

More and more "open source" software is available on the Internet - tools and applications, even whole operating systems, that are distributed freely together with their source code. The paper suggests to use the proven copyright and development structures of this movement for educational software.

This presentation discusses how the Web can be used effectively to teach a language with non-roman alphabet. The website for teaching and learning of Tamil at the University of Pennsylvania contains a number of different modules that use a variety of multimedia components such as animated gifs, JavaScript integrated interactive forms, cloze exercises with image maps, real audio and video, pedagogically relevant pictures and so on. A number of CGI scripts have been used to allow students type in roman and output in Tamil script, so that the Web based writing assignments can be sent to the teacher in Tamil alphabet. Fonts are displayed dynamically to avoid download problems. Suitable testing strategies are employed to develop skills in comprehension and production of the language.

Faculty from Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges will present projects they have developed with funding from a Mellon Foundation grant. These web-based projects run the gamut from course syllabi to materials developed for language, literature and culture courses. A brief overview of the Mellon Project will also be presented.

This panel will address aspects of remote collaboration projects. Cindy Evans will present an overview of learning theories that can serve as guidelines for curricular design. Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien will discuss the Computer Bridge, an advanced German project, linking the home campus with study abroad. Harald Zils will discuss Colgate's collaboration with Freiburg University.