About These Cases

About The Instructional Context - Arabic

Modern Standard Arabic at Penn State is taught within the Department of Comparative Literature. The program, which has been expanding steadily in recent years, offers a 3-semester sequence of 4-credit courses and an advanced level course of 3 credits. Each course is intended to develop students' proficiencies in all four language skills (reading, speaking, listening and writing). The pedagogical approach focuses on communicative skills and teaches both language and culture through the study of authentic discourse. The placement of students is based on both an oral and a written assessment. Student evaluations are performed throughout the semester via standardized tests, oral and written examinations, a cultural presentation as well as a final interview. The Arabic language program fulfills the university's foreign language requirement for graduation.

About This Teacher

Selim Ben Said graduated from Southern Illinois University with an MA in Applied Linguistics and is currently a Ph.D. student in the Applied Linguistics Department at Penn State. When he was in the Masters program at Southern Illinois, he was responsible for starting the first Arabic Language Course for the Applied Linguistics Department. During his three semesters of teaching at Southern Illinois University, he was responsible for developing the Arabic course curriculum 'from scratch' and designing effective teaching materials. Selim has taught Modern Standard Arabic at Penn State for one year.

The Arabic program at Penn State attracts students from different career horizons making the program a rather heterogeneous one in which students’ learning needs are guided by their respective academic specialties. In addition, one of the challenges faced by both students and teachers is to reconcile the dialectal differences that exist between Modern Standard Arabic, taught in the classroom, and the numerous other dialects of Arabic, spoken in different countries of the Arab world. Selim deals with this by introducing in his Arabic class sociological and cultural elements that raise students' awareness about differences between Modern Standard Arabic and Dialectical Arabic.

About The Instructional Context - Korean

The Korean language program at Penn State University consists of a 3-semester sequence of 4-credit courses that begin with the fundamentals of the Korean alphabet, sentence structure, and basic vocabulary, and build toward enhancing students' abilities in speaking, reading and writing in situations encountered in daily life. The curriculum is based on textbooks published by the Language Research Institute at Seoul National University and enriched with instructional materials created by individual instructors. Initial placements are based on an oral interview and progress is monitored throughout the semester via both standardized and informal oral and written assessments. The Korean language program fulfills the university’s foreign language requirement for graduation.

About This Teacher

So-Eun is a Korean national who holds a MA in Teaching English as a Second Language and is completing a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. She has taught in the Korean language program at Penn State for three years. The traditional nature of the curriculum and a consistent mix of domestic and heritage language students create unique instructional challenges for So-Eun. She relies on a range of instructional and classroom management strategies to cope with the differences in her domestic and heritage language students’ language proficiencies and attitudes toward learning Korean.

About The Instructional Context - Russian

The Russian language program at Penn State University consists of a 4-semester sequence of 4-credit courses. Offered through the Department of German and Slavic Languages and Literature, the Russian language program is integral to both the Bachelor of Arts in Russian, which provides students with knowledge of the Russian language as well as a broad background in Russian literature, culture, and civilization, as well as the Bachelor of Science in Russian Translation which provides students with a high degree of skill in translating from Russian to English.

The course featured in this Case Study, Intermediate Russian III, provides intensive practice of Russian reading, writing, listening and speaking and a complete review of Russian grammar. This includes a discussion of participles and verbal adverbs, verbs of motion, and problems of Russian syntax in conjunction with conversation practice and writing assignments. Initial placements are based on an oral interview and progress is monitored throughout the semester via both standardized and informal oral and written assessments. The curriculum is based on the texbook V Puti: Russian Grammar in Context, by Kagan, Miller, and Kudyma which contains audio and video files with comprehension exercises and supplementary activities that focus on the development of the four language skills by presenting realistic settings, situations, and contexts. While V Puti offers various readings (biographies, poems, literature and historical texts) and grammatical explanations and activities, it focuses less on speaking skills and thus, Larysa supplements the curriculum with exercises that target speaking skills utilizing current new programs, modern movies, and various shows popular in Russia. The Russian language program fulfills the university's foreign language requirement for graduation.

Larysa Bobrova is completing a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. She has taught Russian at Penn State for two years. In Ukraine at her home institute, Horlivka State Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages, she taught courses in Conversational English, the Theory and Practice of Translation, Literary Translation, and Interpreting. She also developed courses in Conversational English, Theory of Translation, Translation Editing, Literary Translation and Consecutive Interpreting which included materials developed through exchanges with colleagues from different universities in Ukraine and the US. She has been teaching translation for fifteen years, primarily from Russian into English. These experiences have helped her better understand the most complicated issues for domestic language students to acquire and she has develop both explanations and assignments that facilitate successful language learning.

In this Case Study, the combination of domestic students of different language proficiencies and heritage language students posed instructional challenges for Larysa.  She utilizes specific instructional strategies to cope with the proficiency gap among her students. Her goal is to involve both heritage and domestic students in activities that lessen any psychological discomfort and encourage them to take an active part in class activities in order to improve their overall language proficiency in Russian.

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