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Christina Frei
Teaching represents the most immediate and rewarding venue of combining Christina Frei’s research projects, application of technology and language education. She received the 2010 SAS Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty describing her dynamic classroom presence as mesmerizing. "The intensity of her presence and strategic appeal of her pedagogy engulf the students in a world of German language and culture, in which they feel fortified and challenged."
In Spring 2012, she offers her signature course GRMN 215: Conversation and Composition, designed for those students, who made a commitment to continuing their German language education beyond the basic-language sequence. This semester, GRMN 215 reads two German crime novels and focuses on cultural diversity.
Frei's research project analyzes discourse strategies in a computer learner corpus (CLC), creating a stable and longitudinal CLC by using text-retrieval software for assessing new descriptions of L2 language. Currently, she is writing a first-year German textbook.
Frei designed and implemented the curriculum of the language program at the Freie Universität Berlin international Summer and Winter University (FUBiS), the department's summer study-abroad venue.
In addition, Frei regularly offers courses in Second Language Acquisition (GRMN 516), Teaching and Learning with Technology (GRMN 517), and directs all courses in the two-year language program.
Frei received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis with a Special Emphasis in Second Language Acquisition. She specializes in new approaches to the teaching of German and diverse applications of technology in the foreign-language classroom and has co-written “Co-Constructing Learning: The Dynamic Nature of Foreign Language Pedagogy in a CMC Environment”. In this article, she and her colleagues develop the concept of spiraled interaction.
“Recent innovations in technology allow foreign language learners and their instructors to interact both inside and beyond the classroom using a variety of communicative tools. As a consequence the classroom has been transformed into an extended learning environment which has had a profound effect on both student and teacher roles. In an on-going collaborative research project, we seek to gain greater insights into the benefits of specific computer-mediated communication (CMC) activities and to examine the relationship between in-class, online, and out-of-class learning. In this article, we propose a concept of spiraled interaction—the dynamic interplay of in-class activities that in part focus on meaning and focus on form and online collaborations that have as their primary goal student-constructed representations of knowledge.”
Current projects include the expansion of the Homo.Cyber site: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/german/homocyber/
and research in the development of students' discourse competence within threaded discussion, in particular Blackboard. See her article here: http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v50/n22/teaching.html
