Resources of the University of Pennsylvania.

The University of Pennsylvania has strong resources for the support of a project of this sort:

• Penn's Graduate School of Education, with its unique `Language in Education' Division has long been concerned with issues such as those raised in this proposal. With a strong emphasis on pedagogy and pedagogical appropriateness, Penn's GSE graduates have fanned out into many parts of the world to concentrate on how these issues affect, for example, elementary education in Quechua-speaking Peru, Indonesia, or Africa.
• Penn's Linguistics department, with its strong sociolinguistics component, including such pioneering figures as William Labov, has long been concerned with the question of non-standard language and how our society deals with it. Much of the research on the question of the status of African- American Vernacular English has its roots at Penn, and has already affected the status of AAVE in, e.g. Labov's testimony in the Ann Arbor case, and in Oakland.
• The University has a long history of support for the study of the cultures and peoples of Africa and Asia. It has a large and well-staffed Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Studies, and the oldest South Asian Studies department in the nation. Both emphasize strong disciplinary focus on the study of language, dialect, and historical relationships between language groups. Penn's African Studies program is a consortium of a number of Delaware Valley institutions, and its language offerings are provided by the Penn Language Center.
• The University has three federally-funded National Resource Center devoted to the languages and cultures of Asia (South Asian Studies, African Studies, and East Asian Studies, and support for the Middle Eastern Studies Center, though not federal, is a long-standing Penn tradition.
• The Penn Language Center has recently redefined its role from being that of primarily a place where less-commonly taught languages are housed, to a language resource and research center, fostering research on a broad variety of language-related issues, as well as development of teaching materials, training teachers in the use of multimedia resources, and conducting research on language learning and teaching. The PLC will house the center.
• The International Literacy Institute is housed at Penn, and sponsors research, conferences, and discussion on issues affecting both childhood and adult literacy; a number of regional programs focusing on Asia and Africa are already underway, and ground for cooperation between these two institutes/centers is fertile.
• The Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict is located at the University of Pennsylvania, and is devoted to studying the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict, which have important psychological components. Its focus is on the need to address psychosocial problems as an essential part of conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction, especially with a multi-disciplinary perspective that incorporates the emotional, cognitive, and social problems associated with ethnopolitical conflict.
• The University of Pennsylvania Libraries, with over six million volumes, house extensive collections devoted to the study of language policy and the languages of Asia, mainly in the Van Pelt main collection.
• The Penn Language Center has sponsored a number of language-and-culture projects during its recent history. A conference on the future of the regional and minority languages of France was held in October 1996, and a volume of published papers has just appeared (Blanchet, Breton and Schiffman, 1999). The PLC has now established a Language Research and Resource Center and will begin developing facilities for teacher training, among other issues. The Center will house the program and provide secretarial support, computers, copying, etc. A grant from the Luce Foundation to establish a Luce Professorship devoted to interdisciplinary research and teaching allowed the appointment of an Academic Director, himself a specialist in a minority South Asian language (Tamil) and language policy. This appointment has allowed the Penn Language Center to begin to undertake projects that link pedagogy, sociolinguistic theory, and the socio-cultural context of language learning. Various faculty in GSE, Linguistics, South Asia, and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, provide an umbrella for a number of formal and informal research initiatives. In the last few years different clusters of scholars within Arts and Sciences and Education have undertaken multi-year research projects.
• The Delaware Valley area is a rich cultural mix of people of many ethnic backgrounds, not the least important of which is a growing population of Asians, both of recent and long-standing duration.