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Project name: Boot Camp: Training Language Assistants in the Use of Technology in the Liberal Arts Language Classroom
Project lead(s)
Key collaborators:
Principals
Confirmed Contacts
Interested Contacts
Summary: Many liberal arts institutions employ language assistants to share the target language and culture with American students, to conduct conversation courses, to serve as mentors and tutors, and to plan extracurricular activities. They are a very valuable part of any language program. But while language faculty receive good training and support, these language assistants or language residents often have little to no teaching experience and may have a very different institutional and educational background. They are often unfamiliar with common methodological approaches such as the communicative approach and the intercultural method. Technology not only ties in with these approaches but allows for creative, motivating, and effective teaching and learning. Technology also reflects the reality of many students at American liberal arts colleges and is crucial in common administrative tasks.
Intended outcome: This project is envisioned to ideally function as a follow-up workshop to the NITLE session on “Technology and the Language House Curriculum” in September. Participants would be chosen over the summer of 2007 and the planning group would start planning a workshop, which would be held in the spring of 2008 at the new Foreign Language Resource Center (FLRC) at Pomona College, which will be inaugurated in January 2008 and would serve as an ideal venue. Some language assistants will be invited to join the meeting at Pomona. The vicinity of several participating colleges would make this feasible.
The participants would identify training goals and develop an agenda and training schedule. These would include topics such as multimedia production (videos, narrated photo stories, comics, manga, etc.), communication and collaboration solutions (video conferencing solutions, wikis, blogs, voice boards, course management systems, etc.), possibilities of outreach (web sites, posters, podcasts, etc.), motivational possibilities (computer games, multimedia projects, etc.), and online language tools. Pomona College and Occidental College would then jointly develop a training program and produce materials that can be used for training and teaching purposes at participating campuses. These materials would be in the form of a training manual, which includes the topics, teaching guides, sample lesson plans, sample materials, lists of resources, a glossary, and a guide to hardware and software. The manual would be made available online as an interactive PDF document on a web site hosted by Pomona College and maintained by Felix Kronenberg and the Pomona College FLRC.
The web site would also include files that can be readily used in conversation courses or extracurricular activities. These would include self-produced and thus royalty-free videos (for example to create voice-overs), comics, photo stories, audio and text files. Pictures could be shared with the existing REALIA project database. Students at Occidental College will collect materials that could be suitable for inclusion on the site. Other Occidental students will create multimedia materials to be distributed through the site. Language assistants often struggle to find appropriate and legal multimedia materials that can be used in conversation classes and, together with sample lesson plans, would help the assistants understand and learn how to teach creatively and successfully with (and without) technology. The page would grow through contributions from project participants and, certainly, present and future language assistants.
Project timeline:
August 2007
Spring 2008
August 2008
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