Heritage Languages in America: "Research, Innovation and Policy in the Preservation of LCTLs in America" . The first National Conference on Preservation of LCTLs welcomes proposals for papers and symposium on all aspects of the less commonly taught languages program development. Papers and symposium may report on

• language-specific research and materials development
• professional development models
• analysis of national and state educational policies
• barriers to implementation of programs of the less commonly taught languages.

The mission of the conference is to address the preservation and learning of heritage languages, at all instructional and institutional levels, and in all the many national and state contexts in which this takes place. The conference aims to bring together language educators and policy makers from these many contexts to discuss and share research, theory, and best practices and to initiate and sustain meaningful professional dialogue across languages, levels, and settings. The conference will focus on the following six broad themes:

• Distance/distributed learning administration, infrastructure, and course delivery;
• National policy and advocacy for world languages;
• Online interactions and community;
• Electronic resources for educators;
• Innovative research in language acquisition; and
• Teacher preparation and certification for less and least commonly taught languages.

Featured speakers at the conference will include:Scott McGinnis(Defense Language Institute) Mimi Met (Center for Applied Linguistics)and Olga Kagan (UCLA)

Sponsored by LARC
Language Acquisition Resource Center (LARC)
San Diego State University
http://larcnet.sdsu.edu

November 19, 2004
4:30pm - 5:45pm Room 4E
Refining and (Re) Assessing Advanced Language Proficiency
Elana Shohamy (CALPER) and Mary Ann Lyman-Hager (LARC)

This session has two goals: to argue for the relevance of lexical and metaphoric knowledge for advanced proficiency and to discuss efforts to build this knowledge into classroom pedagogy and assessment as well as into formal assessment instruments, including the FSI-ILR Oral Interview. With regard to formal assessment, focus will be on Level 4 – Distinguished Language Proficiency. We will present strategies and techniques for developing DLP, with particular focus on translators and interpreters and learners from On-site and Distance Education.

The session will be conducted in an interactive format with the presenters offering their insights and pedagogical suggestions and also soliciting commentary and feedback from the audience. The session is expected to benefit all those concerned with teaching and assessing very advanced levels of proficiency.

November 21, 2004
10:00 - 11:15 a.m. Continental B
Studying Language Development Abroad in Light of Learner's Stories
Celeste Kinginger and Kathleen Ferrell, The Pennsylvania State University

This project combines quantitative and narrative inquiry to explore the development of French language competence during study abroad. Group results of the language assessments used are shared and discussed in light of individual case studies examining the variable qualities of learners' experiences as revealed in the participants' own words.

"New Ways of Teaching Chinese"
co-sponsored by CALPER and the University of California Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching
A CALPER Sponsored Chinese Teacher Training Workshop: This one day workshop aims to provide a hands-on experience for college Chinese instructors, TAs, and community teachers with new ideas and new techniques in the field of Chinese pedagogy. Three themes will be covered at the workshop:

(1) Technology. Dr. Chengzhi Chu, UC Davis, Using ChineseTA to Prepare Teaching Materials
ChineseTA is an easy to use computer software program which is capable of automatically and accurately completing many tasks involved in the preparation of instructional materials. Sample tasks may include: adding pinyin to characters, generating character/word lists, indexing word/character distribution, supplying simplified and traditional character contrast, reporting frequency of word/character usage. Participants will have an opportunity to practice the software for their own use.

(2) Heritage language instruction. Huey Lin, UCLA, How to Bridge the Gap between Theories and Practice - Integrated Methods on Teaching Literacy to Chinese Heritage Students.
After a general introduction to the do's and don'ts in teaching Chinese heritage students, this talk will focus on teaching literacy, i.e. reading, to the heritage students. Topics include: a) Material development: material design; balance between pedagogical and authentic materials; b) Tools and techniques: Sentence parsing techniques; text-to-speech software (both on-line and stand-alone); c) Reading comprehension: Using both 'Intensive' and 'Extensive' reading activities in in-class teaching and homework assigning. Participants will be given time to practice in each of the three areas.

(3)Advanced grammar. Dr. Hongyin Tao, UCLA, Using Authentic Material for Grammar Teaching.
This talk addresses the issue of teaching difficult grammar points in Chinese. It will be shown that notoriously difficult grammatical phenomena such as the ba-construction, le, guo, and passive constructions can be effectively explained with the assistance of authentic spoken and written materials, and that this natural text-based method can be applied to other areas of Chinese grammar. Methods of text collection and computer processing of information for teaching grammar will be demonstrated, and participants will be given practice time to solve actual problems commonly encountered in Chinese grammar teaching.

Time: Saturday, October 30, 2004, 10:00-5:30
Location: University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) campus

Registration: Registration is free but is limited to 40 participants. Email the following information to Hongyin Tao (tao@humnet.ucla.edu) as soon as possible and no later than October 15, 2004.

Name:
Institution:
Academic title:
Email:
Telephone:
Chinese courses taught at own institution:

This workshop is jointly sponsored by The Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER), Pennsylvania State University and the University of California Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching.

CALPER Resources, Materials and Projects Gabriela Appel

Meet CALPER at this year's annual meeting of the Pennsylvania State Modern Language Association to be held at the Wyndham Airport Hotel in Pittsburgh. In the presentation, some of CALPER’s projects on advanced language proficiency and the various opportunities and resources available through the CALPER National Language Resource Center will be introduced and materials will be displayed in the exhibit.

The Individual in a Socio-cultural Approach to L2 Learning: The Question of Internalization James P. Lantolf

Using Corpora in Advanced Level Language Teaching
Corpora and Advanced Chinese Language Teaching --- CANCELLED
Concept-based Approach to Grammar Teaching
Assessing Advanced Language Proficiency
Advanced Russian: Conceptual Fluency and Narrative Competence --- CANCELLED
Advanced Korean: Language, Culture, and Interaction
Advancing Proficiency through Project Work
Recent Research on Language Learning during Education Abroad --- REGISTRATION CLOSED
Using Technology to Promote Advanced Language Proficiency
Aspects of Advanced German Language Proficiency --- CANCELLED

Facilitating Multilingual CMC: Unicode Wikis, Blogs and Forums Arlo Bensinger
Working Memory, Synchronous CMC, and L2 Oral Proficiency Development J. Scott Payne and Brenda Ross
Using Student Documentary Film Projects to Promote Advanced Proficiency J. Scott Payne
CMC and Foreign Language Development: A Meta-Analysis of Research Steven Thorne and Jonathon Reinhardt

"Learning through Listening for Advanced Japanese"
co-sponsored by CALPER and the Center for East Asian Studies at UW-Madison
This workshop will introduce multimedia instructional materials for intermediate to advanced Japanese learners, which have been developed based on digital video clips of naturally occurring interactions. The video clips contain interviews with, and conversations among native speakers of Japanese on the topics frequently covered in the existing language textbooks (e.g., customs of gift exchanges, educational systems, experiences of host families, gender roles, etc.). The multimedia instructional materials aim to assist students in the following areas: (a) enhance their listening comprehension skills; (b) explore diverse experiences and perspectives held by Japanese people; (c) understand differences between spoken and written languages; (d) examine the use of honorifics, gendered speech styles, back-channels, etc. in actual interactions; (e) reflect on their own speaking skills and styles in comparison with what is shown in the clips.
Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to examine sample instructional materials and to develop their own materials from video recordings of spoken Japanese.

Presenter: Junko Mori, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, UW-Madison, teaches courses in Japanese, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics. She researches interactions among multilingual speakers and classroom discourse using conversational analysis. She is the project director of CALPER’s “Advanced Japanese” initiative.

Registration Fee: Graduate Students $70; Non-students: $95. The fee covers costs for workshop materials, refreshments, dinner reception on Friday, and a lunch on Saturday. Registration is closed at this point. We look forward to meeting you in Wisconsin.

Registration information is available from the Center of East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/east/Events/Events.html and at CALPER http://calper.la.psu.edu/profdev.php

This technology workshop is sponsored by the Pennsylvania Modern Language Association (PSMLA) and hosted by Swarthmore College Language Resource Center. ACT 48 approved. Details are available from PSMLA. Please follow the title link.

Narrative inquiry as mediational space in L2 teacher development Karen Johnson and Paula Golombek
The development of sociopragmatic awareness in study abroad Celeste Kinginger and Kathleen Farrell
Let's keep our heads: the individual in sociocultural theory James P. Lantolf
Why not why? Teaching of grammar, discourse, and sociocultural perspectives Junko Mori
CA as applied linguistics: crossing boundaries of discipline and practice Junko Mori
Bilingual emotion talk: What does it say about conceptual change in adulthood? Aneta Pavlenko
Some methodological considerations for comparing face-to-face interaction and SCMC J. Scott Payne
SLA and sociocultural theory as bricolage Steven Thorne

Addressing nonnative-English-speaking teachers' and teacher educators' needs Karen Johnson
Rethinking knowledge, knowing, and knowers: The TESOL Quarterly Dialogues Karen Johnson and Judy Sharkey
How can we use corpus information in our teaching Michael McCarthy

Thanks to all of our colleagues who came to visit CALPER's booth at ACTFL 2003.

November 22, 2003
8:15 am - 9:30 am Convention Center - Room 103-B
Joint LRC Session: The Web's Potential: Integrating Media, Data, and Interactivity
Dennie Hoopingarner, CLEAR - Michigan State University; Steven Thorne, CALPER - Penn

Three of fourteen U.S. Department of Education Language Resource Centers will present online resources for language teaching. LARC from San Diego State University will focus on web-based video. Pennsylvania State University's CALPER will look at web-based corpus tools. Michigan State University's CLEAR will highlight interactive web-based language materials.

November 22, 2003
4:30pm - 5:45pm Convention Center - Room 113-B
CALPER Session: Corpora and Language Teaching
Michael McCarthy, Hongyin Tao and Susan Strauss, CALPER, Penn State

Language corpora have become increasingly significant in the description of languages and as a resource for language teaching. Corpora, large collections of written or spoken language, give us new insights into how languages are really used in everyday life, and the results of corpus research have had considerable influence on language teaching through the production of learners' dictionaries, grammars, and textbook materials. This presentation introduces the basic techniques of creating and using corpora, with hands-on tasks, and includes examples from Spanish, French, Chinese and Korean corpora. No special computational knowledge is required. Participants will be able to use knowledge gained to build corpora for their own teaching contexts and to exploit corpora for their own professional development and for the production of teaching materials.

November 08, 2003

Access to social networks and language development during the study abroad experience
Celeste Kinginger

This presentation will focus on the initial results of a study examining how learners gain or are denied access to speech communities during the study abroad experience, and the consequences of this experience in terms of language development, including its grammatical, pragmatic, and metapragmatic dimensions. Participants in the study are 24 undergraduate students of French enrolled in five semester-long study abroad programs in France during the Spring of 2003. The research design of the study combines three components: 1) a narrative study of learner journals and interview data; 2) a developmental corpus analysis based on samples of spoken and written production taken at different points in time; 3) examination of test scores, including a standardized test of grammatical competence, reading and listening in French (the Test de Français International), and a Language Awareness Interview developed for the project, in which participants are asked to demonstrate their metapragmatic awareness of variation in French language use across social / mediational contexts. Results of the quantitative analyses will be discussed in terms of individual developmental histories as portrayed in the qualitative data, with the goal of understanding the sociocultural origins of individual variation in language learning.

October 16, 2003

Plenary Address: On the Other Hand: Gesture/Speech Interface in L2 Performance
James P. Lantolf, The Pennsylvania State University

The analysis of the interface between speech and gesture has gained increasing prominence among researchers working in communication studies, psychology, psycholinguistics and second language learning. The leading researcher on gesture-speech interface, David McNeill (1992, 2000a & b, 2002), describes four approaches to the integrated study of speaking and gesturing: gestures in interpersonal communication; gestures for cognitive regulation; a computational approach to understanding gesture-speech performance; and the transition from gesticulation to sign. Recently, McNeill and his associates have opened up an especially fruitful area of research in which gestures and speech are studied within Slobin's thinking-for-speaking (henceforth, TFS) framework, a localistic version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. This paper reports on a study aimed at investigating the TFS patterns among proficient L2 speakers of English and Spanish. Specifically, it examines the gesture-speech interface with respect to the manner and path constructions deployed by the L2 speakers as they relate a narrative in their L2 and compares their performance to that of L1 speakers of the respective languages. There is little evidence that the L2 speakers use L2 TFS patterns but that they rely instead on their L1 patterns. The general theoretical framework for the paper is provided by Vygotsky's notion of inner speech as it is conceptualized by McNeill's growth-point hypothesis. It is concluded that it is difficult for adult L2 learners without significant immersion experience to develop an L2 inner speech.

September 05, 2003

Dynamic Assessment of L2 Development: Bringing the Past into the Future
Matt Poehner and Jim Lantolf

Dynamic Assessment (DA) distinguishes itself from other evaluative measures of human mental capacity, including language, through eliminating the instructionassessment dualism that underlies current educational practice. It argues that instruction and assessment of subsequent development can be treated as a unified dialectical process. Tracing its roots back to the early work of Vygotsky and Luria on the zone of proximal development (ZPD), DA can be described as a "forward-looking" approach to assessment. While traditional approaches tend to focus on the individual's development up to the present, and thus highlight the person's past, DA attempts to bring this past into the future. To date, most of the research in DA has been concerned with individuals that manifest impaired performance on tests of general cognitive ability. For example, Feuerstein and his colleagues (1979, 1981) have successfully used DA procedures to unveil the learning potentials of such individuals that remained hidden from traditional assessments, and Guthke's work (1986, 1992) on his Learntest concept emphasizes an additional advantage of DAthe individual is afforded opportunities for development through the assessment process itself. Within applied linguistics a dissatisfaction with standard testing practices has emerged, as evidenced by the Critical Language Testing paradigm and the growing popularity of non-traditional approaches to assessment (e.g. performance assessment, group assessments, portfolio evaluations). We believe that DA has the potential to make a significant contribution to this movement. Researchers have already begun to explore the applications of DA to language development, including L1 literary (e.g. Guterman, 2002) and L2 learning (Kozulin, 2002; Anton, 2003). The present paper has three purposes: to outline a theoretical framework of a DA approach to L2 assessment, to review the L2 DA studies that have been carried out, and to discuss a study currently underway (Poehner, in progress).

September 04, 2003

Plenary Address: Spoken Corpus and Methodology
Michael McCarthy

As spoken corpora become increasingly feasible and accessible for different languages, insights emerge about important differences between writing and conversational speech, especially in the areas of grammar and lexis. In this talk I exemplify some of those differences, drawing on spoken British and American English corpora, along with brief references to spoken corpora in other languages. The demands of face-to-face conversation in real time result in a grammar and vocabulary which is often different in a variety of ways. In the case of spoken grammar we find, in comparison with traditional written norms, (a) forms that appear ungrammatical and controversial, (b) forms that appear ungrammatical but not controversial, (c) forms that appear perfectly grammatical but have simply not been noticed or codified, and (d) forms that are rare in written language but very common in spoken, and vice-versa. What are language teachers to make of such phenomena, and can we/should we attempt to teach them? I argue that if we do accept the challenge we need to move away from presentational modes of teaching the language system towards new paradigms rooted more firmly in awareness-raising and induction. In addition, we will need to re-define skills teaching, especially speaking skills, where the notion of listenership will become a significant element of 'listening skills'.

September 05, 2003

Corpora and human language technologies for language learners
Scott Payne, Kathleen Egan, Christopher Cieri - Pennsylvania State University

Corpora generated from broadcast speech are a rich source of authentic language input for language learners. Teachers and learners have sought broadcast news material from audio and video to supplement language acquisition and maintenance (for any instructional level) but the challenge in using video is the time required to locate and preview video sources, and then to prepare engaging instructional activities. Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) in Broadcast News has made significant progress with word error rates ranging between 15-25% (Colbath et al, 2000) and current speech and human language technologies make it possible to automate the capture, transcription, and indexing of audio and video sources to construct an archive of easily searchable, authentic language resources for use in various language learning settings. In the past years, ASR has been used to help learners improve pronunciation (LaRocca et al., 1999; Rypa & Price, 1999; Dalby & Kewley-Port, 1999), assisting children learning to read (Mostow & Aist, 1999), and supporting virtual dialogs or speech-interactive environments (Bernstein et al., 1999; Holland et al., 1999; Harless et al., 1999, Egan 1999). This proposal suggests extending the use of ASR and finding new teaching, learning and research applications. Egan proposed and demonstrated at CALICO (2002) how these technologies have been used and could be used in the CALL environment. The paper will elaborate on how existing ASR technologies, enhanced with natural language processing and statistical text analysis algorithms, can not only assist in materials development, but may also prove valuable for: 1. determining the difficulty level of audio and video resources for language learners, 2. finding resources at an optimal difficulty level for individual learners, 3. building native language corpora, 4. providing a mechanism for applied linguistic researchers to search automatically and manually transcribed learner corpora as a preliminary step to further analysis.

March 11, 2005

The instructional use of digital video clips of naturalistis interactions: Examples f
Junko Mori, University of Wisconsin-Madison