Writing

Living in Beijing

Living in Beijing is an interactive hypermedia project that integrates the study of Chinese language and culture. The project, built on the Metamedia platform, attempts to showcase Beijing’s current transformation in the context of urbanization, globalization, and the transition to capitalism. To this end, the socio-economic and cultural aspects of ordinary people’s lives in the Asian Games Village (AGV) community, located in the northeast of the city, have been chosen as the focus of the hypermedia archive. To present life in Beijing in action, the project contains footage of recreational programs and street scenes, in addition to one-on-one interviews. Students will therefore be exposed to the Chinese language as used in various culturally authentic settings.
When finished, Living in Beijing will have two main components: a Metamedia archive and a web site with interactive maps and links to external web sites. The archival materials will provide the students with an authentic picture of contemporary life in Beijing, whereas the web site will guide the students to the wealth of on-line resources related to these topics.
Living in Beijing is geared towards high-intermediate-level and advanced-level Chinese learners, including heritage learners. The classes will have theme-based units that focus on Beijing’s current socio-economic and cultural transformation.

Looking for Belgium: Contemporary arts as a gate to Belgian culture and history

This project will be repository of digital and scanned images, written documents, video fragments, songs and interviews that will introduce our students to Belgian culture and history through Belgian contemporary arts. Artists will be chosen within the visual arts (painting, sculpture, video art, architecture and photography), the ninth art or art of comic strips as well as those working in music, film, theatre, dance, literature and those preserving the traditions, gastronomy and popular culture in Belgium. The main scope of the repository will be artists who are currently active or who have created their work in the last decades of the 20th century. These contemporary artists will be the starting point for different chains of references to Belgian culture and artists. Indeed, this project will present contemporary materials as links to Belgian history, culture and artists of the past. It will give students access to a unique culture with different influences, mainly the French, the Flemish and the German communities living together in Belgium and each contributing to what Belgian culture represents. Therefore, artists from the three communities will be included in the repository.

The materials will be organized within a traditional MetaMedia archive, which will include the different themes around which the classes will be structured, and each theme will feature the artists most relevant to the theme being studied. The selection of artists within each theme is not exhaustive. This will allow students to make their own selection of materials to be included under a theme and to assume the role of an online curator creating different links between artists.

Generation in Change

The website will consist of 100 video segments plus difficult words, phrases and grammar points culled from these segments. The material will allow our students to study the influences of social change and economic development on the values, morals, and daily life of Chinese students their age as well as the consequent changes to their philosophies of life and their educational experience. Additionally, the material will give our students the opportunity to study the experience of Chinese parents and grandparents regarding these topics before and after the open door policy when China shifted its attitude to the rest of the world as well as reveal the attitudes of the older generations towards the younger generation’s changes.
The website will be a rich resource, giving our students a variety of things to explore. Our students will engage video and other media to develop their interpretations and understanding of Chinese culture, modern society, economics, and family relations. Our students will be able to save the visual materials needed in folders for their own research, projects, papers, and presentations.

España Hoy

España Hoy is a Web-based unit that examines life and culture in today’s Spain, building on and updating our 1998 Consortium project, España de cerca .
España Hoy consists of a new set of video interviews with a variety of people in different regions of Spain talking about life, society and culture in today’s Spain. These interviews will be edited, annotated and cross-referenced. Additional contextual materials, (newspaper and magazine articles, surveys, advertisements, public service campaigns ads, songs, radio reports, photographs, maps, additional digital video and other web links) will be added to provide a more general perspective to the personal viewpoints expressed by the interviewees. While this project aims to bring up to date many of the basic topics that formed the core of España de cerca, it will also address other issues confronting Spanish society today, such as growing immigration, international terrorism, rapid urbanization and its ecological consequences.

Pilot project to digitize audio, visual, and spiraled web interactive materials for the teaching of first year Yiddish (GRMN 4

I propose a pilot project to develop web-based materials to enhance the teaching of Yiddish language at Penn. I hope to hire a student worker to begin the process of editing media files and perhaps text files, to upload them to the media server, and to link these files to Blackboard, as well as to help me develop language assessment tools, threaded discussions, and other communication tools on Blackboard for first year Yiddish, GRMN 401/JWST 031 and GRMN 402/JWST 032.

Form-focused Jeopardy Games for Business Chinese

This project aims to develop 20 sets of form-focused exercises in the format of the Jeopardy Games using Microsoft word and PowerPoint for the in-class use of Business Chinese (CHIN 382) in the spring semester. There entail two goals for this project: 1) to provide the opportunities for students to focus on linguistic forms in an engaging manner; 2) to prepare students linguistically so that they can perform the uncoming meaning-focused tasks more accurately, fluently and appropriately.

Material Development for Teaching the Shona Language at the University of Pennsylvania

The purpose of this project is to develop curriculum materials to enhance the teaching of the Shona language at the University of Pennsylvania. I have a 2 tier approach to developing the materials. In the first part of the project, I created exercises intended to give an understanding of the Shona language and culture to elementary level students. The type of exercises assumes the student has little or no knowledge of the language, and focuses on general, but socially useful, conversations that are explored through dialogues.

I have also created 15 Shona units for the Online Multimedia Vocabulary and Pronunciation Project, which was carried out under the guidance of Dr. Audrey Mbeje. The project provides Shona vocabulary items that are useful‎ in different situations and is intended to provide students with a vocabulary and pronunciation guide.

Web-Based Essays for Heritage Learners

Development of a Web-based intermeidate reader of modern Chinese essays for heritae learners. In collaboration wth Qin Hong Anderson.

Multimedia Pedagogical Dictionaries for Ten African Languages

Development of pedagogical dictionaries in ten African languages: Amharic; Bambara; Hausa; Luo; Shona; Swahili; Twi; Wolof; Yoruba; and Zulu.

Common Errors in Learning Korean with Supplement to Original Grant

On the basis of data collected for several years, the project director will compile a handbook for elementary and intermediate learners of Korean which will address common errors which English-speakers make. Sections will be devoted to common errors in 1) Lexicon; 2) Grammar; 3) Sociolinguistics and 4) discourse/pragmatics. Explanations of proper usage will be followed by several exercises. The handbook will be useful for both heritage and non-heritage learners of Korean and should prove appropriate for Korean programs at post-secondary institutions regardless of which textbook is currently being used.

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Supplement to original grant will allow for incorporating additional data in production of a handbook for learners of Korean.