All - All Levels

Authentic Hindi/Urdu Audio-Video Materials for Classroom use

Hindi and Urdu represent distinct speech registers, but are taught as one language in American universities at the beginning level. Within Hindi and Urdu there are multiple speech registers. The goal of this project is to collect language data distinctive of various speech registers for use as authentic audio material in classroom. The present project is extremely important because it will for the first time collect spoken language samples of Hindi and Urdu speech registers, and make the language data available to all the national centers teaching Hindi/Urdu.

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.

Summer Pilot Project for Khowar and Torwali Dictionary Development

The summer pilot project will enable the principals to prepare for a larger proposal to the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning in October 2001.

Preparation of data--both lexical entries and audio files--for on-line Khowar and Torwali dictionaries.

Recordings of Native Speakers for Aural Proficiency in Spanish Classes: Cara a Cara

This project will allow the taping of segments for Cara a Cara in Buenos Aires, Argentina during winter quarter, 2000. Taping in Argentina would provide key opportunities to expand upon the projects general themes by illustrating examples of authentic speech and settings in a Latin American context. The Argentine component could be used by both Latin American Studies and Spanish Language instructors as a teaching and study-abroad orientation resource in the college.

Sanskrit Parser: Phase I: Nominal Forms Searching.

The current project is the first of five stages envisioned in creating a comprehensive Sanskrit parser. In stage one, the current pilot project will produce a program to generate all the inflected forms of any Sanskrit nominal stem. In stage two, the nominal-forms-inflection program will be used in a program to search for all the contextually produced phonological variations in a Sanskrit text file. Subsequent stages will complete the parser with verbal inflection and the handling of agglutinative structures. Housed in the Sanskrit Library website, the programs produced will be freely available to scholars worldwide immediately.

Spanish Writing Center

The project will help establish a Spanish Writing Center at Brown which will assist students in intermediate and advanced undergraduate Spanish courses to improve their writing in Spanish. The Spanish Writing Center will be housed initially in the Language Resource Center and will be staffed by three graduate students from Hispanic Studies. It will provide consultations in person, by telephone, or via e-mail for 27 hours each week.

Pluma: Spanish Writing Center - Continuation

Pluma, the Spanish Writing Center at Brown University, was established last year with a campus-based grant from the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning. It has been operational since January, 2004. For it we have created a web site with resource links and an online appointment system. Each semester the Center has employed three graduate students who have seen hundreds of undergraduates seeking assistance with course papers for Hispanic Studies literature and culture courses. We have used all of the original funding to fund the first year of operation, and request an additional 3,000 to hire two graduate consultants for the spring of 2005. This spring we will explore the transition to a model whereby we would train undergraduate consultants who are native speakers of Spanish, to be paid from the Hispanic Studies department budget for undergraduate assistants.

Language Resource Metadata Project - Planning Workshop"

The proposal seeks funding for a Planning Workshop for the Language Resource Metadata Project, to be held at Brown University in mid-October, 2003. This meeting of the working group and members of the Brown Library and CIS communities is intended to provide background for on-going projects at Brown (such as the Digitial Library Initiative and STG's database project) that will have a significant impact on the scope of the Language Resource Metadata Project. The Metadata Project is an on-going collaboration between language educators from Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and Brown to develop and refine standards for high-quality metadata, along with standards for the format, storage, and transmission of digitized language learning materials (such as images, texts, audio, and video).

"Audio Recording Studio" [Languages and Cultures Webcast Service - Phase 1]

This proposal seeks funding to equip a digital recording studio in the Language Resource Center for the production of language learning materials. It is envisioned as the first phase in a larger project involving web broadcasting of materials in less commonly-taught languages.

"Making Technology Work": A Collaborative Process and Design Workshop for Language, Culture, and Literature Instruction

The Language Resource Center, the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, the Instructional Technology Group of CIS, and the Center for Language Studies will organize a workshop and follow-up activities aimed at planning and implementing technological solutions to specific problems in the teaching of languages, cultures, and literatures. Participating teams, each consisting of one graduate student and one faculty member, will meet for three days in early June, with a follow-up meeting in late August, and an evaluation module in December.