NEALLT 2020

Friday, March 27
3:00-5:00 pm Language Resource Center Pardee 418	OPTIONAL Workshops ... please sign up with registration if interested. Using Virtual Reality in the Liberal Arts (Friday, 3 to 5 PM, followed by the FLLRC tour)  Eric Hupe  (Lafayette College) The goal of this hands-on workshop is to  show educators the possibility of creating an immersive experience for students to study important sites of cultural heritage. We will also explore the possibility of VR technology for language instruction and learn how the instructor can  be the “tour guide” of his or her class while taking a cyber visit of site in the L2.. Please bring your fully-charged cell phone (i-Phone or Android) and download ahead of time  the Google Expeditions app to your phone.
5:00 – 7:00 Max Kade Lounge (Pardee 429)	RECEPTION (included in Registration)

Saturday, March 28
8:30 – 9:00 Max Kade Pardee 429	BREAKFAST and REGISTRATION
9:00-9:30 Max Kade Pardee 429L	Welcome, Acknowledgments and Opening Remarks Luba Iskold, NEALLT President, Muhlenberg College Alison Byerly, Lafayette College President
9:30-10:15	Conference Keynote Post-communicative methods: Social pedagogies and the role of technology  Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl, Director, Center for Language Study Yale University Language pedagogy currently finds itself in the “post-methods era” (cf. Magnan, 2008; Richards & Rogers, 2014) which is marked by a critical re-examination of communicative language teaching (CLT). Among the main criticisms of CLT are its primary focus on transactional and largely oral language production and its lack of emphasis on culture (Kramsch, 2006). The widely-cited 2007 MLA Report pointed to the growing divide between language and content and called for new approaches to language education that would better integrate disciplinary perspectives and enhance the intellectual focus of language instruction through a greater emphasis on texts and with an increased focus on authentic content. At the same time, globalization has changed the broader context for language learning significantly over the past two decades and has contributed to a more plurilingual and pluricultural classroom environment (Kramsch, 2014). This has led to new methodologies and social pedagogies that engage the learners in more collaborative activities that go beyond the language classroom and promote meaningful interactions in their local communities (Charitos & Van Deusen-Scholl, 2017; Van Deusen-Scholl & Charitos, forthcoming). In this presentation, I will explore what we mean by post-communicative methodologies and provide some examples of current projects at Yale and Columbia that have incorporated project-, community-, and place-based learning activities. I will particularly also look at the role that technology can play in connecting learners with each other and with their surrounding communities.
SESSION 1: 10:30-11:00
Pardee 421	Motivating Advanced Students with a Documentary Project for Linguistic and Cultural Competence  Meejeong (Song Cornell University)  Advanced students’ proficiency levels vary from Intermediate Mid to Advanced Mid in my Korean classes. Projects can be effectively used to be tailored to each student’s needs and improve their linguistic and cultural competence. The 9 students (8 heritage + 1 non-heritage) were grouped into three, depending on their interests in these three topics: Impeachment, Life, and Marriage. Then each topic was covered by 2 steps during class, and 2 steps outside of class. The first step was an introduction to the related documentary. The designated group prepared slides of the summary of the documentary to present to the students who haven’t yet seen it. A natural question and answer session occurred during this group’s presentation to negotiate meanings and grasp the sociocultural background related to the topic. The second step was an in-class discussion, after all students watched the documentary. The third step was to write one’s opinion on the topic as an assignment. The fourth step was for each group to create a short documentary related to their topic, which was their final project. Students incorporated the previously covered topic from the textbook, Generation Gap, into their documentary: they included different opinions from different generations by a survey and/or interview. At the end of the semester, all students watched the groups’ completed documentary videos and discussed them, in which students were better engaged and motivated in the conversations. Canvas Discussions, Collaborations and Media Library were used to support all steps of their project.
Pardee 401	Trip to Japan by Google Tour Builder Naoko Ikegami (Lafayette College) Anyone studying a foreign language would want to visit the country of the target language they are learning. It is natural that the more you learn the language, the more you want to try to use it. In this presentation I will introduce the use of “Google Tour Builder,” which is a web-based storytelling tool. Intermediate-level students use this tool to produce virtual trips to Japan. In the second year of Japanese class, students start learning Japanese geography in reading materials. So, I assigned them a project to plan their own trips and design itineraries. They plan the logistics of the trip and details of activities–including shopping and eating–which are among the most enjoyable things during the trip. Technically, “Google Tour Builder” shows the placemarks, including transportation, pictures and videos of the sightseeing places with textual explanations and links, if necessary. The students learned how to use “Google Tour Builder” quickly; this technology increased their interest in visiting Japan, while facilitating language acquisition with a fun activity. I am certain that this amazing tool can be applied to any tour with different languages from all over the world.
SESSION 2: 11:05-11:35
Pardee 401	A Multimedia Platform for an Advanced Italian through Film Course: Experience from the Classroom  Elisa Dossena (Princeton University)  This presentation showcases an online multimedia platform used in a course of advanced Italian through contemporary film. Cinema is a highly motivational tool for teaching a foreign language. It operates as an open window through which students can experience and learn the target language embedded in its sociocultural context, thus facilitating and improving their linguistic competence. A digital platform is the most appropriate learning environment for this approach. On the platform, students were engaged with clips and entire films along with exercises, grammar, vocabulary applications, interactive readings, and digital discussion boards. The platform made students interact directly with the films and each other through exercises and activities built within film sequences that were selected based on their linguistic, sociolinguistic, cultural, and intercultural interests. In my presentation, I show how the online platform helped me achieve a multimodal language pedagogy. Through concrete examples, the participants will learn a new way to use cinema in a language class from the direct experience I had. I will ask the audience to simulate one of the activities I posted on the online platform. The platform was created with the support of the Princeton Center for Language Study and the Princeton McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.
Pardee 429	Learning Spaces Beyond the Language Center Michael Jones (Swarthmore College) This session will discuss the resources and potential applications of the Campus MakerSpace and a pop-up prototyping space we're calling IdeaLab.
SESSION 3: 11:40-12:10
Pardee 401	Promoting Intercultural Engagement: Using a Student-as-Ethnographer Approach in a Hong Kong-U.S. Telecollaboration Students’ Digital Stories via Telecollaboration  Sara Villa (The New School)  This presentation will show examples of the use of telecollaboration in online classes to engage students not just in a language exchange but in a collaborative project that aims at producing significant content in the target language. Strategies and tools used to plan, organize and carry out a telecollaboration project will be shared with the audience as well as all the steps necessary to create a digital story.  The presenter will also put this project in the context of online synchronous teaching and will give details on pedagogical choices as well as examples of telecollaboration outcomes. Essential elements of a digital story as a product that is part of students' learning portfolio, will also be discussed. Participants will learn about online synchronous activities, interpersonal tasks, telecollaboration projects and the process of creating a digital story.
Pardee 429	Sharing Creative Media Projects via Google Sites and QR Codes  Dennis Johannssen (Lafayette College)  I will present a creative digital assignment that shares students' work with broader communities on campus and beyond. I invite students to produce creative work that translates a passage, scene, or excerpt from the course's material into another form, genre, or context. Over the last year, they turned video sequences into poems, created short films about women's experiences in STEM fields, drew sketches based on short stories, and created 3d prints. We discuss, revise, and collect the work on a Google site. To share their work with broader audiences, we create a flier with a QR Code that allows easy mobile access on campus and beyond. I would like to discuss the process of creating this assignment along the lines of selected examples from recent classes on German Romanticism, Diversity in German Literature and Film, and Post-War German Cinema.
Pardee 421	Five Years of Chinese-American Telecollaboration: Practice, Pedagogy and Research Han Luo (Lafayette College) Despite the rapid development and increasing popularity of telecollaboration in foreign language education in the past twenty years, telecollaborative exchanges involving Chinese as the target language have not received sufficient attention both at the practice and at the research level. To fill the gaps, the Chinese language program at Lafayette College initiated the Chinese-American Telecollaborative Learning Program connecting Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) students of at Lafayette with Chinese-speaking English majors at a large university in Shanghai, China through WeChat, a popular Chinese mobile social media platform, in spring 2020. In the past five years, various telecollaborative exchange projects have been established to facilitate language and culture learning through Cultura-inspired tasks and activities, the use of songs, the learning of idioms, the discussion of sensitive topics, and so on. This presentation will provide a summary report of different practical models of Chinese- American telecollaborative exchanges with a focus on the challenges, benefits, and pedagogical implications. In addition, this presentation also discusses how research can be conducted with data gained from such pedagogical activities.
12:10-1pm LUNCH: Pardee Lobby	LUNCH Open lab in Pardee 418: Try out the virtual reality software
SESSION 4: 1:00 – 1:35
Pardee 401	Collaborative Online International Learning Involving College English and ESL Students  Deniz Gokcora (Borough of Manhattan Community College)  Collaborative learning provides opportunities for students to investigate global realities from a cross cultural perspective. In a time when acquiring global competencies is vital for the development of an individual, virtual exchange through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) programs connects campuses at different parts of the world. In this COIL project, a developmental ESL writing class in a community college was connected with a freshman English class at the University of the Bahamas. The objective was to have a fuller understanding of the higher education experience and comparing students’ higher education experiences in the U.S. with the experiences in the Bahamas. Utilizing CUNY Academic Commons, CBox (Open Lab) platform, students were asked to read R. Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire” and write a personal argumentative essay by supporting or criticizing the main ideas in the essay. Then, they needed to peer review each other’s essay to provide some reflection and constructive feedback. In a second project, students were asked to select a social justice issue in pairs and investigate it in their environment and post an oral presentation using Screencast-O-Matic based on a digital image on the COIL website. Students post responses to these social justice issues. Consequently, they understand that one social problem at one location can be a global issue. Their perspectives on global and intercultural understanding are elicited through a Global Competencies Initiative at the end of the course.
Pardee 429	El Fanzine: Spanish Booklet for an Advanced Class Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa (Lafayette College) El Fanzine was a group assignment of my Spanish Advanced class, which combined students’ individual written pieces in different genres (movie reviews, opinion essays, literary criticism, etc.) with collective work such as collages and playlists. A fanzine is a booklet-style, low-fi, DIY publication, usually photocopied and distributed on a small scale among specific social groups such as music or fan subcultures. This is a language through content course and as the instructor, I wanted to reinforce students’ language skills, cultural proficiency, while also experimenting with a material object that might be seen as an unusual medium for them. The project-based learning combined putting together written, presentational and visual skills in the target language, Spanish, with a focus on the relation between Latin American cultures and US culture and politics. The assignment was crafted to incorporate student agency in multiple ways. They were asked to use conventional academic research tools, while combining them with social issues and authentic materials that are part of their experiential knowledge. Thus, using colloquial Spanish became a focal point for many of the fanzines. This presentation will assess the methods of this particular project, students’ final results, and my own self-assessment of the experience.
SESSION 5: 1:40 – 2:10
Pardee 421	ESL Students’ Digital Literacy Practices and Interactions in a Social Bookmarking Tool Deniz Gokcora, Oksana Vorobel, Tuvi Voorhees (Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY) Free Web 2.0 tools, such as Instagram, Facebook, or DIIGO and their affordances have not only changed the nature of communication in and out of the classroom, but they also have brought new opportunities and challenges in the literacy practices. Although there have been some studies on second language (L2) writing in the digital contexts; few studies, however, have examined language learners’ use of a social bookmarking tool with the focus on digital literacies and interaction (Zou & Thomas, 2019). This qualitative multiple-case study investigates English as a second language (ESL) students’ digital literacy practices and interactions in a social bookmarking tool DIIGO from an ecological perspective (van Lier, 2004). Five ESL students in an advanced writing course at a community college participated in the study. The data sources included artifacts, observations, interviews, and researchers’ e-journals. Thorough within-case and cross-case analysis of the data revealed (a) various types of digital literacy practices ESL students engaged in when using DIIGO, (b) complexity of language learners’ interactions in the digital context, and (c) ESL students’ language use. In the discussion of the study, we elaborate on the nature of ESL students’ digital literacies and interactions and the role of the context in shaping them. The findings and discussion of the study include suggestions for further research on language learners’ digital literacies and interactions and implications for practice.
Pardee 401	Getting on the Same Page: Collaborative Reading and Annotative Software  G. Cory Duclos (Colgate University)  This presentation will discuss the use of the collaborative reading and annotation software in foreign language classrooms. Various platforms exist that allow students and instructors to annotate texts as they read them. Using such software outside of class can be a useful pre- reading exercise for texts in a foreign language and a useful way to gauge comprehension of key ideas. This presentation will discuss two such annotative platforms and the ways they can be used at various levels. Prism, created by the University of Virginia Scholar’s Lab, is a simple tool that lets students color code aspects of a text according to instructor-defined criteria and can be adapted for lower-level reading comprehension checks. Hypothesis, an open source software created by the non-profit Hypothesis Project, is a more robust platform for annotating digital texts and can be used to generate more substantial conversation in courses with higher- level reading assignments.  I will demonstrate use-cases for each of these tools and models for best practices in collaborative annotation in the foreign language classroom. Participants should come away with a sense of how to incorporate such activities into reading assignments as a way of priming students for more communicative activities and discussions in class. Participants will also be given a chance to test out each software’s functionality and pose questions and comments about how it could benefit teaching at their institutions.
Pardee 429	The i-World Badge: A Summative and Formative Assessment.  Katherine Stafford (Lafayette College) The presenter will discuss findings from a capstone course presentation/conversation where students' shared the story of their personal language learning journey in college and how they represented in the i-World badge . As required for the Spanish major, students applied for Lafayette’s i-World badge, a credential based on four years of cumulative development of their e-Portfolio’s. Each student showcased his/her badge findings during a formal presentation/conversation with classmates and the Spanish faculty. The NEALLT presenter will share samples and feedback from this exciting exchange, where students reflected on their personal language learning story. Students demonstrated that they (1) were informed, open-minded, and responsible people who are attentive to diversity, (2) sought to understand and empathize with diverse communities, and (3) can identify and analyze critically a variety of global issues. Eportfolios, videos from the student presentations, and badge criteria will be shared.
2:15-2:30	BREAK
SESSION 6: 2:30-3:00
Pardee 401	The Global Mind of a Virtual Scholar  Luz Gamauf (Montgomery County Community College)  Daniel Alejandro Hernandez Bravo (INACAP Universidad Technológica de Chile), via Skype The Global Mind of a Virtual Scholar will show you how you can start using the vast global network around you to engage your students virtually. We will show how global learning has been successfully implemented in both a language-based Key-Pal program and non-language specific multidisciplinary courses to help engage students across the globe.
Pardee 421	Vloggers As "Experts": Giving Students Further Resources for Developing an Identity in a Foreign Language  Betsy Jane Kells (University of Pennsylvania)  The purpose of this presentation is to inspire participants to widen the pool of “expert” voices in their classroom through the presence of video bloggers (vloggers). Native speakers share cultural tips or create educational videos that are directly related to the content in the foreign language classroom. This presentation directs participants in using this content to create classroom community and guide learners in constructing an identity in the target language.  First-person content creation in digital communities has evolved over decades from a virtual diary to interactive videos on a variety of subjects. Educational vloggers have readily available content, allowing learners to guide their learning by exploring what a particular vlogger has created, and participating in an affinity space. Through watching mediated and virtual forms of information and self-expression, students are given the opportunity to construct an identity in the foreign language that is not confined to their classroom or institution.  I will engage the audience by sharing examples from my own teaching and ideas on further expanding this concept, such as including additional vloggers, creating a project-based assignment that emulates vloggers. Research from social constructionism theory will be shared. Furthermore, participants will be asked to share any ideas they have and will have the opportunity to brainstorm ways to get started.  Participants will learn a basic approach for incorporating vloggers’ videos into their foreign language curriculum as well as how to incorporate 21st century skills such as digital literacy and media literacy into the foreign language curriculum.
SESSION 7: 3:05-3:35
Pardee 401	Kaleidoscope - Exploring Cultural Bias through Immersive Experiences  Stephan Caspar (Modern Languages, Dietrich College, Carnegie Mellon University)  Sébastien Dubreil (Modern Languages, Dietrich College, Carnegie Mellon University)   How do we resist assumptions and cultural stereotypes? What can we learn about ourselves when we are asked questions of other people's culture and language? How can we learn through interactive immersive experiences?  The Askwith Kenner Global Languages & Cultures Room at Carnegie Mellon University is a purpose built technology classroom, research lab and meeting place where students can engage with cultures and identities, explored through active learning, technology and media creation.  In January 2019 we collaborated with students from CMU's Entertainment Technology Center to create an interactive experience exploring implicit cultural bias. This session invites you to find out more about "Kaleidoscope", one of a series of experiences within the Modern Languages Department that support the teaching of culture and language. We will talk about the creation of the project, our design and research process and whether we met our overall aims. Session participants will help us design new questions, discuss context and the potential for wider application of the project.  We will discuss ways of supporting wider intercultural learning at  our institution. We are also interested in opportunities afforded by immersive interactive experiences. Is a game or an art installation appropriate for the questions raised? How are users interacting with the experience and what are the next steps in its development? So are you ready to meet someone new?
Pardee 421	No Phones in the Classroom? Yes! Phones in the Classroom!   Ekaterina Shutenko (Lehigh University)  The purpose of the presentation is an overview of different mobile tools and applications that can be used in a language-learning classroom. I will focus on the examination of ways in which standard applications used by everyone daily can be employed by language instructors in an original way to work on different language skills. I am also going to address the question of how mobile phones can help us bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world. The audience will be able to try some of the tools right away with the help of their smartphones. Some other tools will be presented through pictures and videos taken in my classes.  I expect the participants to rediscover some of the commonly used applications and to start implementing into regular practice those they will find appropriate for their classroom. By the end of the presentation, I hope the audience joins me in addressing a smartphone in students’ hands not as a harmful distractor but as a valuable tool and a device that helps to bring the real world into the classroom.
Pardee 429	Local Culture in the First-Year Arabic Curriculum: Integrating Community Members and a Bilingual Archive Interactive Presentation  Benjamin Smith (Swarthmore College)  It is a considerable challenge to integrate meaningful cultural units into a first-year language curriculum in ways that maintain discussion in the target language, build linguistic competency, and give students a deeper understanding of the cultural perspectives of, in my case, native Arabic speakers. Having faced this issue in teaching first-year Arabic I have made curricular changes that take advantage of Swarthmore College's proximity to a community of recently resettled Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian residents of Philadelphia. Approximately every two weeks students are given assignments from outside the main textbook focused on learning about the lives of these community members and the challenges of the resettlement process. This bi-weekly cultural addition to my first-year Arabic curriculum also takes advantage of an archive of bilingual texts, many of which have been digitized and made available to the public. Beyond the homework and class time dedicated to this content, an Iraqi community member who is a skilled calligrapher will lead a workshop for students, and the entire class will visit Northeast Philadelphia for a culminating event with Arabic speaking community members.  In my presentation I will further explain this work, including the challenges I've faced in curating and developing suitable materials for an elementary Arabic classroom, and offer an early evaluation of the benefits of attempting to "localize" a language too often perceived as only spoken "far away," in the Middle East and North Africa.
SESSION 8: 3:40-4:10
Pardee 401	Mobile Technology: Enhancing Language Learning and Intercultural Competence Elisabeth Arevalo-Guerrero (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)  Maria Manni (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) Mobile technology can facilitate students’ language learning opportunities and intercultural communication experiences while serving as a tool to respond to the increasing interest for internationalizing the curriculum. The purpose of this presentation is to share our experiences in using virtual exchange conversations in both an elementary and advanced Spanish language courses to promote intercultural communication with native speakers around the globe. First, we will justify the importance of providing authentic intercultural communicative experiences in the language class to develop language proficiency as well as intercultural competence. Second, we will explain how we used specific mobile technology to provide virtually exchange conversations aligned with the learning outcomes and curriculum. Finally, we will describe the benefits and challenges observed in relation to students’ learning and use of mobile technology.
Pardee 421	Ofrenda de día de Muertos: A Campus–wide Community Building Cultural Competency Activity for an Advanced Class Adrian Espinoza-Staines ( Lafayette College) The Ofrenda de día de Muertos was a class wide assignment in my Contemporary Spanish America and Hispanics in the US class. The assignment was planned and carried out in conjunction with the Office for Intercultural Development, the Hispanic Society of Lafayette student organization and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures’ Resource Center. As a large scope multi department activity one of the projected goals of this exercise was to foster diversity, inclusivity and cultural competency in the Lafayette community by having students create a Day of the Dead Ofrenda at Farinon College Center, and plan out activities related to the festivity for other students to engage with the festivity. The assignment served a multilayered purpose within the classroom setting itself: to familiarize students with the festivity of the Day of the Dead by exposing them to several cultural products (film, essay) related to the festivity, to help them develop a higher degree of cultural competency and elicit team working skills by way of building their own ofrenda, to hone students research and writing skills in Spanish by creating a pamphlet with information on the festivity and by producing a personal essay reflecting on the overall experience with the assignment. Finally, students were asked to submit their personal essays through the ePortfolio platform thus familiarizing them with a platform suitable for showcasing their work. This presentation will assess the methods of this particular project, showcase students’ works: pamphlet, the ofrenda, final essays, photographs and other activities, an intervention by one of the participant students and my own self-assessment of the experience.
Optional 4:30	FLLRC Tour
7:30 – 9:30	DINNER (requires registration) Mesa Modern Restaurant (42 S 3rd St, Easton, PA )

Sunday, March 29
9:00 – 9:30 Max Kade Pardee 429	BREAKFAST
9:30 – 10:30 Pardee 418	Picard, His Eyes Open: Getting Students to Lose the “Universal Translator” and Explore Internet Realia  Kathryn Dettmer (Drexel University, University of Pennsylvania, Widener University  J. Michael Boglovits (Temple University, University of Pennsylvania)  In the episode “Darmok” of Star Trek, the Next Generation (S5E2), the crew of the Enterprise is shocked when their universal translator, on which they depend to understand other races, does not work, not because it is not translating, it is. The language being spoken by the Tamarians is metaphoric, allegorical, idiomatically tied to their history and their culture.  As the crew of the Enterprise encounters this new civilization, they learn that language and culture are symbiotic and cannot be understood one without the other. Deep learning computer tools like Google Translate are not capable of nuance and understanding.  This workshop will explore different ways of using the Internet and learning platforms to encourage students to explore the target cultures and to understand how those target cultures create meaning in different ways, because there is no one for one translation for every concept. Using our Star Trek metaphor, we will present different methods of teaching students how to find realia online and how to work their discoveries into in-class activities and assignments.  The workshop will be interactive. Participants will be broken into smaller groups for a scavenger hunt project. How the project was developed and can be adapted, as well as other ways to encourage exploration of the target culture will be discussed. Participants will be asked to contribute ideas to a best practices list developed during the workshop to be shared at the end with all participants, in order to boldly go into the FL classroom.
10:30 – 11:30 Pardee 418	Panel 2 In case the Pope comes to Town: Quick advice for occasional online classes Mary Toulouse, Lafayette College Michael Jones, Swarthmore College Luba Iskold, Muhlenberg College
11:30 – Noon Pardee 418	Your Turn ... question and discussion period
Noon	BUSINESS MEETING
Noon – 1:00	LUNCH (requires extra registration)