The South Asia Regional Studies Department, in conjunction with the Penn
Language Center at the U. of Pennsylvania held a workshop on the use of
multimedia and film in the S. Asia context the weekend of January 10-12,
1997.
This workshop attracted participation from researchers, teachers and
scholars interested in language teaching, sociolinguistics, cultural
studies, film studies, and other areas where image, sound, language, gender
studies and related subjects intersect.
The principal objectives of the workshop were to identify ways in which
computer-based multimedia tools and data could enhance teaching (for
example advanced language courses) and research in the South Asia context,
and to design an authoring framework that would enable South Asianists to
develop their own applications for film analysis and at the same time
support the collaborative use of data and applications across the South
Asia scholarly and teaching community. The workshop built on a powerful
hypermedia system (IDE) running on a Macintosh platform that has proven
effective and usable in several educational contexts, and that has been
used successfully to design and implement a course in Frenc h film analysis
at Penn and to manage and analyze complex, multimedia microethnographic
data.
Using Satyajit Ray's "The Chess Players" (Shatranj ke Kilari) as a test
case, The capacities of IDE and hypermedia in general were first
demonstrated and then applied to the specific interests and concerns of
workshop participants.
In addition to data management and analysis the workshop also tried to
address issues in the design of projects and interfaces that support
effective learning and research. Working intensively throughout the
Saturday and Sunday sessions, participants quickly realized some of the
enormity of the task of manipulating a database designed to control and
inventory the moving image by the end of the Saturday session it was clear
that more work was needed, and Sunday's session was devoted to planning
collaborative work.
We agreed to look into the creation of an ftp site on the PLC's website, to
which participants could contribute data and analysis, perhaps eventually
access IDE via the web, and construct a collaborative analysis of this or
other South Asian films. By the close of work on Monday, following the
workshop, an ftp site with a netlist was set up on the PLC server, and
participants and other can access it by typing
sarsflac@plclist.sas.upenn.edu.
The kinds of issues participants were interested in, and hope to continue
work on, included
Film Analysis, in and of itself; i.e., the teaching of film,
especially South Asian films
Film analysis in FLAC (Foreign-Language Across the Curriculum)-type
courses;
Film analysis, for later incorporation into advanced language courses;
Sociolinguistic and ethnographic analysis, either as a tool for
incorporation of such material into a language course, or for itself (i.e.
research);
Other issues: gender, caste, discourse, whatever (either for research
purposes or teaching).
The workshop was co-chaired by Harold Schiffman of the South Asia Regional
Studies Department at Penn and Director of the Penn Language Center, and
Ralph Ginsberg, Graduate School of Education. Participants
represented a wide range of interests in language learning, film and
cultural studies and sociolinguistics, and came from as far away as
England, Canada, and the west coast, as well as from Penn and nearby
institutions.
Some funding for this workshop was provided from Penn's South Asia Center's
budget.
HERE'S SOME MORE INFORMATION ABOUT IDE; NOT ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY
FOR THE STORY, BUT COULD BE USED FOR PADDING IF YOU WANT MORE WORDS.
Background: IDE.
IDE is a hypertext/hypermedia system developed at Xerox PARC, and extended
and applied to courses on film analysis and analysis of microethnographic
data by Ralph Ginsberg (Graduate School of Education and South Asia
Regional Studies) at Penn. It was used to design several film analysis cum
language learning courses in the Romance Languages Department here at Penn,
allowing users to analyze films scene by scene, shot by shot, character by
character, to carry out projects on a multimedia computer-based platform,
and to access language help of various sorts. IDE can be used to manage and
analyze any sort of complex, multimedia data of interest to Workshop
participants, and to design courses and course materials, by, e.g.
giving easy access to the films and other primary data at all times;
- allowing the user to index and conceptualize films and other data in a
number of ways (e.g. by character, by narrative element, by a particular
language use, by a particular dialect, by a gendered usage, and by
mixed-gender discourse);
- using linking facilities to relate and compare various aspects and
data elements to one another (particular characters or speakers, age-graded
usages, literary vs. spoken dialect, Urdu vs. Hindi usage, same-gender
language vs. mixed-gender discourse, etc.);
- Coding and storing linguistic data for analysis or use in help systems;
- Storing and organizing annotations and interpretations of various
sorts (e.g. allowing researchers concerned with code-switching,
accommodation theory, discourse analysis and other sociolinguistic issues
to actually access empirical data on the phenomena they are interested in),
and grounding them in the actual data;
- Querying and visualizing data in different way so as to uncover and
verify complex relationship, interdependencies, and hypotheses.
Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, as a powerful hypertext system it
encourages and facilitates multiple, interlocking hierarchical and
nonhierarchical organizations (as opposed to an outline, which represents a
single hierarchy); and provides a medium for data sharing, communication,
and collaboration between scholars and educators.
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Teaching and Learning of Tamil using Local Area Network (LAN)
Vasu Renganathan
University of Pennsylvania
The Local Area Network (LAN) has been a popular and an efficient way
of sharing information among people within any localized work place such
as universities, colleges, financial institutions etc. Even though LAN is
a subset of WEB technology which has a wider accessibility, it is more
efficient than the latter for various reasons such as fast and easy
accessibility, localized work based information dissemination and so on.
Here, I discuss how the LAN is being used effectively to teach the Tamil
language at the University of Pennsylvania.
The software used to make Tamil learning sofware is called Hypercard, a
powerful authorware software developed by Apple Corporation. This
software is ideal for writing language learning software materials for
many reasons such as a) it has built-in audio and video players, b)
adaptability of foreign language fonts is simple and easy, c) it allows
fast and efficient hyper links between different pages, d) it allows
animation of pictures and letters and e) each page of text or lesson
prepared using this software may be accompanied adequately with all
related references, using as many hiding buttons and fields as one want to
make every lesson very resourceful and informative. Furthermore, it is an
ideal and user-friendly software to be useable in LAN work places
efficiently and without too many technical complexities.
The Hypercard Tamil software that has been developed and being used
through the LAN work place at the University of Pennsylvania and at the
University of Michigan is equipped with most of the features listed above.
This software is accessible to students and faculty using any Macintosh
computer connected to LAN at these two universities. Since both the
University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan are equipped
with many computing labs on campus including dormitories, using this
software by students is found to be very convenient. This software
package has twenty three hypercard stacks consisting of one hundred and
four Tamil lessons in total. The lessons start from alphabet, to advanced
level of instructions. These lessons are organized in such a way that
they can be used for three different levels of Tamil instruction viz.,
beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. The intermediate and
advanced level materials are further supplemented with video clips from
selected Tamil movies. Each movie clip is accompanied with the dialogue
script, so that the students can watch the movie and simultaneously read
the script.
The lessons in this software are graded carefully in order to introduce
the grammar, vocabulary and cultural content of the language step by step
with necessary reinforcements. The content of the lessons in each of
these stacks is basically any one of the actual speech contexts like
'asking directions', 'ordering food in a restaurant', 'hiring taxis' and
so on. Students get an opportunity to listen to the conversation
pertaining to every lesson, and at the same time read the sentences.
Simultaneous and instant consultations of spoken versus written forms of
Tamil sentences, getting English translation for Tamil sentences, reading
the grammar points, etc., are the other important features of this
software. Further, suitable facility is provided to listen to sentences
individually or the whole conversation repeatedly for any number of times.
Students are required to use the software as part of their reading
materials for the class. Every conversation is planned in such a manner
that the use of one or more grammatical form is emphasized heavily in them
with suitable descriptive notes. This way the instruction in the class is
focused more upon the conversation and speech than upon teaching the
grammar in details. Since this software provides all the necessary
information regarding the passive skills viz., reading and listening,
class room instruction with the instructor is fully concentrated on the
active skills viz., speaking and writing.
Use of this software is also sometimes accompanied by the instruction
in the computing lab in order to integrate the speech component and the
listening component at the same time. Given the nature of complexities
involved in Tamil due to its highly inflectional nature and differences
between spoken and written style, this software is found to be very
effective and resourceful. On the one hand this software functions as an
online archive of information pertaining to the structure and the
conversational contexts of the Tamil language, and on the other hand it
serves as an effective teaching tool from the point of view of the
instructors and as a good learning tool from the point of view of the
learners.
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Links to important sites
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Laserdiscs For Hindi & Urdu
The Five College Foreign Language Resource Center, based at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, is currently producing the Five College
Foreign Language Laserdisc Series. This series of laserdiscs with
accompanying Hypercard programs is being produced by the Center's Director,
Elizabeth Mazzocco, along with a staff of native speakers and technical
assistants, and with supervision and assistance from professors of the
languages. Among the 12 projects in production are materials in Urdu and
Hindi; Professor Surendra Gambhir of the University of Pennsylvania is the
Educational Consultant for these projects.
The laserdiscs include interviews shot on location in the U.S., India, and
Pakistan, and include segments on work, education, travel, cooking, family
life, and the role of women. The goal is to expose students to a variety of
native speakers in order to increase comprehension. Students using the
laserdiscs will be able to access a second audio track when they have
difficulty understanding an interview segment; the second track, recorded
in a studio, is slower and more clear.
The Hypercard program provides a range of questions, most in the target
language. In Hindi the questions are a mix of multiple choice and short
answer; in Urdu the questions are multiple choice only. The interviews and
accompanying questions progress in difficulty; the materials are thus
designed to be useful to Hindi and Urdu students at the
elementary/intermediate level.
For information on these materials, please contact Elizabeth Mazzocco,
Director, FCFLRC, 102 Bartlett Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
MA 01003; 413-545-3453.
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Annual Meeting of SALTA
The annual meeting of the Association was held in Chicago on March
15, 1997. The meeting was attended by a small number of persons. The
issues on the agenda were the drafting of Language Learning Framework and
the membership drive. There was a str ong feeling for making the Madison
(Wisc.) conference at the official conference of the Association where we
should organize a panel on some pedagogic aspect of South Asian languages
and have our annual meeting. Manindra Verma (U. of Wisconsin) presided o
ver the meeting.
Annual Meeting of NCOLCTL
The annual meeting of The National Council of Organizations of Less
Commonly Taught Languages was held in Washington D.C. on March 22, 1997.
Surendra Gambhir (U. of Pennsylvania) represented SALTA.
In addition
to the Director's report, various affiliate organizations reported their
progress on the writing of Language Learning Framework. There was also a
demonstration of the capabilities of CouncilNet and LangNet. The Council
is also planning to have
an annual LCTL Conference. The meeting ended with election of new
officers.
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Tamil Conference in Berkeley
George Hart (U. of California - Berkeley) organized a Tamil conerence
on April 4-5, 1997 in Berkeley, California. Among issues discussed on the
first day were computerization of Tamil, putting digitized Tamil texts in
the web, having mirror sites in C alifornia, Germany & Singapore, Unicode
for Tamil characters, copyright issues, on-line dictionaries and
bibliographies, putting the pictures of people who have contributed to
furthering of Dravidian studies and making available pictures of Tamil art
like temples, Chola bronzes on the Web. The second day was more of a
cultural event open to students and others. The teaching and learning of
Tamil to youngsters in the community context was also discussed. The
meeting was attended by professionals in the academic world as well as
from the computer industry.
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SALTA Workshop on Language Teaching &
Learning
SALTA organized a workhop on March 15, 1997 in conjuntion with the
annual meeting of Association of Asian Studies in chicago. The workshop
was primarily addressed to the needs of communicty language teachers.
Herman van Olphen (U. of Texas) discussed the need of exploring the Web
for a variety of materials and made a number of suggestions for
introducing different activities in a language classroom. Surendra Gambhir
(U. of Pennsylvania) discussed about assumptions for teaching a language
and also mad e suggestions for language learning activities. Vijay Gambhir
(U. of Pennsylvania) presented various methodologies for teaching
languages in addition to practical suggestions for enhancing the
motivation factor. Manindra Verma (U. of Wisconsin) presided o ver the
workshop and in addition to persons from the academic world, a small
number of community leaders mainly from the Chicago area were in
attendace. The discussion that followed the three presentations was very
engaging for every one.
SALTA Joins Hands with Columbia
University
Language Teachers Training Workshop
Susham Bedi (Columbia U.) organized a day-long workshop on language
teaching and learning of South Asian languages in the community context.
The meeting was for the benefit of community teachers of the New York
area. It was held on April 25, 1997 at C olumbia University and addressed
the following issues: Learning a Language (Richard Korb, Columbia U.),
Teaching Methodologies (Vijay Gambhir, U. of Pennsylvania), Using
Authentic Materials in the Language Classroom (Susham Bedi, Columbia U.)
and Script a nd Concept of Hindi Grammar (Frances Pritchett, Columbia U.).
Each presentation was followed by questions-answers. There were also two
panel discussions on Technology and Language Learning and How to Motivate
Parents and Students to Learn a Language.
