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Language and Culture: Finding, Assessing, and Exploiting Online and Media Resources for Language Teaching

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Date: March 13 - 15, 2009 (6:00 PM, Friday - 12:00 PM, Sunday, CDT).
Location: Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA
Price: 7 program units per participant

Who should participate

For faculty, instructional technologists, and librarians from participating institutions who teach or support the teaching of foreign languages. Participants will address the challenges of locating, evaluating, and manipulating resources for teaching culture in the language classroom. Both technical and pedagogic issues will be addressed; workshop sessions will teach skills at both a beginning and intermediate level.

Program Description

In May 2007 an Ad Hoc Committee of the Modern Language Association released a long anticipated report on "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World," urging a less instrumentalist view of language instruction. The committee advocated a greater integration of culture and language that would produce university-level curricula leading to "translingual and transcultural competence" that "places value on the ability to operate between languages." The goal is for students to operate as "capable and informed interlocutors with native speakers."

Of course, establishing a sufficient level of cultural competence requires that faculty and students have access to a wide variety of authentic cultural materials and the ability to effectively and appropriately integrate them into courses. In the context of the MLA report, and with the understanding that liberal arts colleges and universities have seldom been content to teach language for purely utilitarian purposes, this conference will build on discussion of the teaching of culture at NITLE's recent programs on language houses, study abroad, and the teaching of Chinese, Arabic, and other languages. (Participation in these previous events is not required to register for this conference.)

Though it is often said that English is the language of the Internet, and it is true that the largest segment of WWW content is in English, taken together, content in languages other than English is predominant on the Internet. A wealth of resources is available to students and teachers of foreign languages, even in the least-taught languages, and can be easily accessed from any computer with an internet connection. In addition to these resources, colleges have also invested considerably in traditional media resources--film, video, audio, and software--that can be easily exploited via the use of new technologies for specific pedagogical purposes.

This conference explores these resources and their use in the classroom with a particular emphasis on addressing challenges that inhibit effective use:

1. Location of resources. How does one locate and navigate through resources in another language? What particular challenges are there to searching for resources in non-western alphabets? How do librarians help faculty find resources in languages that they, themselves, do not speak?
2. Assessment of resources. New technologies and the array of resources available on the Internet have provided language faculty members, their academic support partners, and their students with an embarrassment of riches. Whether it is the ability to converse with native speakers of non-English languages in their home countries, read a foreign newspaper in another language, or even simply order and pay for a DVD from an overseas distributor, so many resources are available to the language teacher as to be overwhelming. Assessing these resources and determining which might be the most pedagogically useful for which purpose is a challenge for faculty and staff whose time is already a precious commodity.
3. Exploitation of Resources. What are best practices for the exploitation of resources, technical and pedagogical? Depending upon responses to the conference's call for proposals, the workshop and presentation sessions of this conference may explore the conversion of analog to digital media, storage of digital media and student projects, coping with the temporary and changing nature of online resources when such resources are course materials, and other issues.

Conference participants will gain a better awareness of materials available for teaching "translingual and transcultural" competence and will explore strategies, both technical and pedagogic, for most effectively integrating these strategies into classroom instruction.

Program agenda

Download the conference agenda (.pdf, 977.66 KB). The agenda features presentations by faculty, instructional technologists, and librarians from participating colleges who responded to this call for proposals (.pdf, 37.04 KB).

Lodging Recommendations

For your convenience, NITLE has arranged a special rate for program participants at:

• Comfort Inn & Suites (1630 West Street, South NE Side, Grinnell, IA, 50112 | Phone: 641-236-5236)

To secure the special NITLE rate of $74.99 per night (plus sales & occupancy taxes) please make your reservations by February 15, 2009. 

This special rate is available to conference participants for the nights of March 13 - 15, 2009.

Travel Recommendations

If traveling to this event, please Grinnell is located roughly 60 miles from the Des Moines International Airport (DSM) and the Cedar Rapids International Airport (CID).

Other information

A workshop component appropriate for participants with varying levels of experience is envisioned for this program. Instructional technologists, librarians, and faculty with certain levels of competence in various skills will have the opportunity to sign up for advanced workshops that will be concurrent with sessions for beginners.

Conference sessions will take place mainly in the Joe Rosenfield Center and the Noyce Science Center.

Questions?

For more information about this event, including its agenda and what to expect from participation, please contact Michael Toler at . For logistical questions, please contact Julie Lancaster at .