Register for free at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nerallt-2022-fall-conference-free-registration-tickets-425946014997
NERALLT 2022 - Saturday, October 22, 2022
Beyond the Classroom: Preparing Students for Real-World Engagement
Virtual - Zoom links sent to registrants
Email Joe Borkowski - borko (at) mit (dot) edu - with questions/issues during the day.
Overview (full titles and abstracts on following pages)
8:45 AM
Zoom C - Open Chat
9:00 AM
Zoom C - Welcome and Remarks from NERALLT President Joseph Borkowski
9:15 AM
Session 1
Zoom A - STARTALK Grant Project: Choose to Study Russian for Professional Needs
Zoom B - Learning the Role of Japanese Vernacular
9:45 AM
Session 2
Zoom A - Creating a Culture of Community by Accessibility
Zoom B - Arabic Story Time via Zoom
10:15 AM
Quick Break
10:20 AM
Session 3
Zoom A - Fun with Cartoons in Arabic: Making Extensive Multi-Modal Input Possible
Zoom B - Educating Wise Cyborgs: One Path to Preparing Students for Success in the Computer-mediated, AI-populated World That Awaits Them Beyond the Classroom
10:50 AM
Session 4
Zoom A - Place-based Education through Multimodal Map Storytelling
Zoom B - The Arabic Phonetics App. ACOCO تطبيق الأصوات العربية
11:20 AM
Quick Break
11:25 AM
Zoom C - NERALLT Business Meeting / Networking / Lunch Break
12:00 PM
Session 5
Zoom A - Opening Language Instruction: Shaping Meaningful & Impactful (Digital) Spaces
12:30 PM
Session 6 - Lightning Round - Zoom A
• Arte en 5 minutos
• Using Synchronous Video Exchange to Develop Intercultural Competence
• Create a Custom Online “Guess Where?” Game with Desmos
• Telecollaboration and Intercultural Competence
1:10 PM
Session 7 - Workshop - Zoom A
Beyond the Classroom: Preparing Students for Real-World Engagement
2:30 PM
Session 1 - 9:15 AM
Zoom A
STARTALK Grant Project: Choose to Study Russian for Professional Needs
Maria Khotimsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Veronika Egorova, Harvard University
The presentation will discuss development of an open access educational resource that features interviews with Russian native and near-native speakers who are leading specialists in a variety of STEM-related and public service fields, and helps prepare students for careers as global professionals. This platform provides a meaningful and purposeful introduction to professions and serves as a unique resource for using and expanding Russian language in different content domains, including science (mathematics, physics, biology), technology (IT and cybersecurity, aerospace technologies), and public service (environmental studies, international relations).
Zoom B
Learning the Role of Japanese Vernacular
Naoko Sourial, Columbia University
This presentation examines project ideas related to real-world experiences. Specifically, it examines an ungraded mini-project within the Spring 2022 2nd Year Japanese I class that I taught and implemented. Students researched and presented different language expressions / phrases that they were both interested in and tied to Japanese culture. Students drew from specific vernacular used in Japanese Anime and TV dramas in their mini presentations. Students exchanged questions, feedback, and posted their reflections on Canvas Discussions after their presentations. This presentation also demonstrates how implementing a project like this can foster critical thinking, insight into intercultural competence, and the important role of vernacular in language acquisition. Scaffolding made to encourage student engagement is mentioned as well.
Session 2 - 9:45 AM
Zoom A
Creating a Culture of Community by Accessibility
Elena Carrion-Guerrero & María Datel, Boston University
Tourism and traveling to the target language country is ideal for language acquisition. Sometimes we travel physically and other times we pretend to travel through classroom activities. Thanks to technology, the latter has become easier in the past decades. But how can we approach such travel? This session will discuss how to revise a traveling unit from a lens of inclusivity. By working with authentic user-friendly tools, presenters will model how to present a diverse and welcoming city – in terms of race, language, gender, ability, etc. – to a tourist in the target language. These inclusive materials will enable students to learn about culture and inclusive language, as well as spark discussions on how cities are becoming more accessible. At the end of the unit students will create a final product using an online portfolio.
Zoom B (Quinnipiac)
Arabic Story Time via Zoom
Layla Bahar Al-Aloom, Cal State Fullerton & Cal State LA
The presenter will share her experience with the interactive, virtual story time held via Zoom (a video communication platform). Children of Arab origins across the United States listened and interacted with other children in Arabic-speaking countries throughout this story time. Through this program, the children were able to connect Arabic story time by listening to an Arab storyteller and reading an authentic story via Zoom. Arab kids were encouraged to use Zoom features to interact with Arab kids around the world. It was a unique opportunity for families to engage in literacy-building activities. The presenter will also share her successful experience in engaging children and families over the virtual platform. This was a wonderful opportunity for children to build on their knowledge base and expand on their experiences in learning the Arabic language.
Short Break
Session 3 - 10:20 AM
Zoom A
Fun with Cartoons in Arabic: Making Extensive Multi-Modal Input Possible
Richard Cozzens, Harvard University; Eric Bartolotti
Many Arabic students complain that their learning materials leave them with a large gap between what they learn in class and what they need to understand authentic input sources. The presenters will present one attempt to help bridge this gap through (1) the creation of vocabulary learning resources based on a Jordanian video series, and (2) implementing a co-curricular study program for university Arabic students in which they independently learn to recognize vocabulary and then extensively watch videos from the series. The presenters will describe the rationale and theoretical bases for this project, the choice of a family cartoon video series in one of the Arabic dialects, the steps taken to create a frequency list of words and phrases using digital analysis, and the implementation of the independent listening program along with anecdotal results and student testimony.
Zoom B
Educating Wise Cyborgs: One Path to Preparing Students for Success in the Computer-mediated, AI-populated World That Awaits Them Beyond the Classroom
Stan Harrison, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Having developed an AI capable of passing the entrance exam of 60% of the universities in Japan, AI-expert Noriko Arai (https://tinyurl.com/49jrez3n) came to believe that educators must respond to an AI-created “urgent” need for a revolution in education. Educators fail students, she claims, where they focus on teaching students to “pack ... knowledge without understanding the meaning of [that] knowledge.” Because “AI can [already] do” information processing better than human beings, Arai argues that students must learn how to “coexist with AI” by becoming more and more capable of understanding the “meaning” of things — something that “humans can do better than AIs.” Toward this end, I will present the interpretative aspects of a class on cyborg communication and culture that I developed (https://tinyurl.com/mr3rhzu2) in order to prepare students to succeed in their real-world engagements with the computer-mediated, AI-populated world that awaits them beyond the classroom.
Session 4 - 10:50 AM
Zoom A
Place-based Education through Multimodal Map Storytelling
Liling Huang, Boston University
By using the local community and environment as a learning hub, place-based education has the potential to attune learners to local diversity and develop learners’ intercultural competence. The presentation introduces two examples of place-based education in the mandarin classrooms at various levels. The first project aims at helping students become more aware of the linguistic landscape in different communities in Boston and understand its meanings at multiple layers including its physical, social, and symbolic meanings. The second one guides students in an active process of refining their hypotheses about Boston with the purpose of challenging their stereotypes. In addition to presenting the pedagogical design and learning outcomes, the speaker also discusses the role of multimodal map storytelling in shaping students’ engagement in their interpretation and reflection of the relationship between place, language and culture.
Zoom B
The Arabic Phonetics App. ACOCO تطبيق الأصوات العربية
Muhammed El-Ghaled, Ain Shams University
Non-native students of Modern Standard Arabic often face challenges in acquiring the phonology system of Arabic. Processes of transfer from mother tongue to the target language often take place in learning which could constitute a challenge for educators. At the phonological lever, there is limited number of contrastive analysis researches between Arabic and English and scarcity of such research between Arabic and Chinese, French, German, Hausa, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu. Speakers of these languages need a program that helps in learning Arabic phonemes and in particular the sounds they do not have in their languages.
In this paper, solutions to these challenges will be presented and our Arabic phonetic App will be introduced. The ACOCO App. is designed to improve Arabic pronunciation of non-native speakers of Arabic. ACOCO focuses on 'international Arabic', including Arabic from The Middle East and North Africa. It is available on Apple store.
Short Break
Lunch/Meeting - 11:25 AM
NERALLT Business Meeting / Networking / Lunch Break
Session 5 - 12:00 PM
Zoom A
Opening Language Instruction: Shaping Meaningful & Impactful (Digital) Spaces
Inés Vañó García, Saint Anselm College
The aim of this presentation is to showcase several pedagogical interventions that highlight how Open Digital Pedagogies (DeRosa & Jhangiani 2017; Stommel 2014) facilitate the expansion of teaching and learning beyond the classroom where students can be thought of as knowledge creators, having an audience and an impact on their institutions and/or communities.
By moving beyond the traditional final written text-based essay, composition, or presentation and conceiving the final artifact as public-facing projects, students are active participants in the decision-making of every scaffolded step of the project/assignment. Throughout these innovative and creative practices, students reflect on what it means to have a public voice, and analyze the relationship between knowledge production and social change. Students, as knowledge producers, active critical thinkers, and researchers, link scholarship to their local communities, and are able to reflect on the multilingual and multiethnic cultural identities, and engage in a meaningful way within the public outside the classroom.
Session 6 - 12:30 PM - Lightning Round
Zoom A
• Arte en 5 minutos
• Gema Mayo-Prada, Dartmouth College
• The goal of the activity is that in 9 weeks the students are able to recognize and understand 15 paintings from Spanish speaking artists using only 5 minutes of class time once or twice per week and Instagram. The activity requires that the students research a painter and a work of art, that they present the painting orally to the class, that they write a formal paragraph about their painting in the Instagram class account and that they make comments or questions orally and in the Instagram account about other classmates’ presentations.
• Using Synchronous Video Exchange to Develop Intercultural Competence
• Shutan Dong, Boston University
• This presentation explores using synchronous video-based speaking exchanges to develop students' intercultural competence and language proficiency. The project included 25 students in an intermediate college-level Chinese course that focused on current topics in the Chinese speaking community. Students engaged in at least four 15-minute conversations beyond the classroom with diverse Chinese native speakers in mainland China, Taiwan and the U.S.. Student reflections and analyses of conversation recordings show that this project deepened students' intercultural awareness and improved their oral proficiency as well as cross-cultural communication skills. This project can be easily embedded into curriculum at other proficiency levels or across languages with appropriate adaptation.
• Create a Custom Online “Guess Where?” Game with Desmos
• Shannon Quinn, Michigan State University
• Many of us have played games of “Guess Who?” in our language classes to practice descriptions of people by having students guess which cartoon character their partner has chosen. But with Desmos, an application originally meant for math classes, in addition to creating Guess Who? games for online classes, you can create similar online games that have more of a “real-world” focus. One way to do this is to include photos from Google Street View as the prompts, and a “real-life” scenario in which students have to decide where to go in a city. In this lightning round, I will show you how to create these “Guess Who?” and “Guess Where?” games.
• Telecollaboration and Intercultural Competence
• Sarab Al Ani, Yale University
• This five-minute lightening round presentation aims at giving a brief description of the tellecoaboration project that was completed Spring 2022 in the class of Elementary Arabic. The presentation will briefly share project details and feedback provided by the students by the time they completed the project. The presentation will also share some of the challenges that the project faced as well as useful resources that other language instructors can use in case they decided to implement similar projects in their classes (especially for Arabic as one of the less commonly taught languages in the US and for which resources might be limited).
Session 7 - 1:10 PM - Workshop
Zoom A
Beyond the Classroom: Preparing Students for Real-World Engagement
Michael Marsh-Soloway, University of Richmond; Shu-Chen Chen, University of Virginia; & Karen James, University of Virginia
Encouraging students to connect their L2 learning to real-world challenges, relationships, and careers is easier said than done. Traditional pedagogical models tend to reinforce the illusion that the classroom connects only tangentially to society, functioning more so as a siloed space for theoretical experimentation than substantive application. While these norms provide safety, they also contribute to the passivity of student audiences, suppressing the intrinsic drives to apply their learning and take strategic risks in the fulfillment of autonomously identified goals. New forms of instruction that introduce and connect students to external partners, perspectives, and experiences, consequently, are needed to empower students with the intrinsic motivation, curricular opportunities, and interpersonal channels to articulate interests, and take action with an informed drive to realize their unique aspirations. This session will challenge attendees to rethink L2 program design.