News & Events

The Language Resource Center is pleased to announce that on Friday November 6th at 3:00 in IAB 352 Drs. F. Nazikian, S. Sato and H. Hamada will give a presentation and lead a discussion on: "Student-Centered Instruction and its Implementation."

The presenters will discuss how to promote and implement student-centered instruction and how to encourage ‘autonomous learning’. They will show how student-centered instruction has been practiced by the Japanese language program. Two projects will be introduced: the podcasting project, which was done by the first year Japanese students and the social issues project, which was done by the second year Japanese students.
 

The Language Resource Center is pleased to announce that on Friday October 23rd at 3:00 in Philosophy 301 Dr. Alla Smyslova will give a presentation and lead a discussion on:  “The Role of Grammar in a Communicative Classroom.”

Dr. Smyslova is currently a Lecturer in Discipline in the Slavic Languages Department at Columbia University.

The Language Resource Center is pleased to announce that on Friday October 9th at 2:00 in Philosophy 301 Dr. Carol Numrich will give a presentation titled:  “Encouraging optimal language practice through communicative approaches to language learning.”

The goal of the presentation is to refresh our knowledge of communicative approaches in second or foreign language learning by comparing didactic versus collaborative modes of teaching.  To increase effective teacher-student and student-student interactions in our classes, we will explore alternative question types, classroom settings and tasks.  These activities facilitate acquisition of the second language and prepare students for authentic language use.

Dr. Carol Numrich is currently a Senior Lecturer in Columbia University’s American Language Program (ALP), where she teaches intermediate and advanced ESL classes, leads curriculum-planning teams, and is the instructor of Methods in Language Teaching and Teaching English Grammar in the post-baccalaureate TESOL Certificate Program.  She has published several listening textbooks, including Consider the Issues, Face the Issues, Raise the Issues, and Tuning In, and is co-editor of the multi-skill, theme-based NorthStar series.

As part of its effort to establish a peer-to-peer mentoring program, the Language Resource Center is pleased to announce a series of information sessions and workshops centered on presenting, discussing and promoting best practices in second language teaching and learning.

The first information session is a discussion of the Language Teaching Review Process at Columbia University.  The presentation and discussion will be lead by Richard Korb and Linda Lane and will take place on Wednesday September 23, 2009 at the Deutsches Haus, 420 West 116th Street between Amsterdam and Morningside from 5 to 6:30 PM.

The presentation will cover the review process, the guidelines of the process, professional development and the peer-to peer mentoring program. Although the presentation is of interest primarily to language lecturers, all are welcome.

If you have any questions, please contact the LRC at vk169@columbia.edu

Video links of the information session can be found here.

 The Language Resource Center is pleased to announce that on Wednesday May 6th at 2:00 in 255 IAB (SIPA Building) Dr. Maria Carreira is going to give a presentation on  heritage language teaching and learning.

In her presentation she will report on the results of the National Heritage Language Survey and discuss the implications of these results for heritage language teaching and learning. Funded by a grant from the US Department of Education, the survey was designed to inform the development of curricula, materials, and professional development projects in the heritage languages. The survey offers an unprecedented look at the linguistic profiles, goals, and attitudes of 1800 college-level heritage language learners (HLLs) across different languages and geographic regions in the United States.

The responses reveal key commonalities among all HLLs and HL teaching contexts and point to key priorities in heritage language teaching, including developing curricula and pedagogical strategies that a) are learner-centered and respond to the needs of students at different levels of readiness, b) connect to local HL communities and resources, and c) focus on the development of literacy skills.

Dr. Carreira is a professor at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at California State University, Long Beach. She is also co-director, with Olga Kagan, of the heritage language materials development project at UCLA, a project funded by the Department of Education. She is the co-author of two Spanish textbooks, Nexos, a first-year text and Sí se puede, a textbook for teaching Spanish to native speakers. Her publications focus on US Spanish, heritage language teaching, Spanish as a world language, and Spanish phonology. She has been an invited speaker at various summer institutes for heritage languages, including, most recently at the South East Asian Summer Languages Institute (SASLI) at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, where she conducted a seminar for instructors of heritage language teachers in the languages of south East Asia. She is currently editing a special issue of the Heritage Languages Journal on identity in heritage language teaching and learning.

 Frances Boyd is on the faculty of the American Language Program at Columbia. She is a specialist in content-based language teaching that integrates language skills and develops critical thinking. Her research interests include language for specific purposes (business, teaching fellows), vocabulary development, and language teacher education. Her publications include an academic English series (NorthStar), an Italian language textbook (L'italiano con l'opera), a business English textbook (Making Business Decisions), and articles on a range of topics related to language teaching and learning.

For Spring 2009 the Wimba Audio Board has been replaced by a new audio tool in CourseWorks.  On Friday (January 23rd) and Friday  (January 30th), Bill Koulopoulos will give a short demonstration and answer any questions you may have about it.  The demonstrations will take place between 2:10 and 3 at the LRC lab in IAB.

Also please find attached an Audio Discussion Board help handout.
 

The LRC and the Teaching Center are hosting
Kenneth D. Crews, J.D., Ph.D.
Director, Copyright Advisory Office (CAO)*

Dr. Crews will be leading a discussion entitled “Protecting Your Scholarship: Copyrights, Publication Agreements, and Open Access”, a topic of significant relevance for any author or creator of copyrightable works. Copyrightable works include the traditional products of academic activity and inquiry, including books, articles, lectures and class notes, as well as software, databases, websites, schematics, drawings, blueprints, renderings, movies, songs, lyrics, sculpture, choreography, landscape designs, and many other products of human creativity. Now that we have more channels for access to and expression of these works than ever before, the issues surrounding control and use of copyrightable works are becoming ever more complex. We hope you will join us in an engaging review of the issues and your rights as an author and creator of copyrightable works.

Please RSVP to vk169@columbia.edu