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Christina Frei Senior Lecturer |
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Teaching represents the most immediate and rewarding venue of combining Christina Frei’s research project, application of technology, and teaching for a new century. She offers two new courses this year: Dark Deeds (GRMN 356): a content course on German crime novels and her brand-new course Life in-between (GRMN 387): Contemporary German Authors, which investigates texts by contemporary “German” authors with diverse roots, who live in between countries, cultures, heritages, traditions and languages and who question issues of nationhood and nationality. Her research project analyses discourse strategies in a computer learner corpus (CLC), which is unique in three ways:
The project seeks to create a stable and longitudinal CLC by using text-retrieval software for assessing new descriptions of L2 language. In August 2008, Frei presented her initial research findings at the 15th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA), Essen, Germany, with the paper “Articulation of a German Foreign Language program: Applying data from a CMC-based learner corpus.” The completion and evaluation of the plethora of on-line data was partly funded through a SAS Language Teaching Innovation Grant from the University of Pennsylvania Each summer, Frei directs the department summer-study-abroad program and the German language program at the Freie Universität Berlin international Summer and Winter University (FUBiS) gaining valuable insights into issues connected to study abroad education. Therefore, she will present her paper “Marketing Abroad: The Americanization of Foreign Study Programs.” at the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in San Francisco, December 2008. 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, her colleagues and she 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/ Awarded for excellence in teaching, Frei is an enthusiastic and experienced teacher whose commitment to teaching is kindled by her students' self-reflective engagement with learning a language.
updated November 2008 |
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