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Living in Beijing

Living in Beijing is an interactive hypermedia project that integrates the study of Chinese language and culture. The project, built on the Metamedia platform, attempts to showcase Beijing’s current transformation in the context of urbanization, globalization, and the transition to capitalism. To this end, the socio-economic and cultural aspects of ordinary people’s lives in the Asian Games Village (AGV) community, located in the northeast of the city, have been chosen as the focus of the hypermedia archive. To present life in Beijing in action, the project contains footage of recreational programs and street scenes, in addition to one-on-one interviews. Students will therefore be exposed to the Chinese language as used in various culturally authentic settings.
When finished, Living in Beijing will have two main components: a Metamedia archive and a web site with interactive maps and links to external web sites. The archival materials will provide the students with an authentic picture of contemporary life in Beijing, whereas the web site will guide the students to the wealth of on-line resources related to these topics.
Living in Beijing is geared towards high-intermediate-level and advanced-level Chinese learners, including heritage learners. The classes will have theme-based units that focus on Beijing’s current socio-economic and cultural transformation.

Development of Hybrid Course Templates for Greek and Latin

Business Chinese Teaching Material Development

Looking for Belgium: Contemporary arts as a gate to Belgian culture and history

This project will be repository of digital and scanned images, written documents, video fragments, songs and interviews that will introduce our students to Belgian culture and history through Belgian contemporary arts. Artists will be chosen within the visual arts (painting, sculpture, video art, architecture and photography), the ninth art or art of comic strips as well as those working in music, film, theatre, dance, literature and those preserving the traditions, gastronomy and popular culture in Belgium. The main scope of the repository will be artists who are currently active or who have created their work in the last decades of the 20th century. These contemporary artists will be the starting point for different chains of references to Belgian culture and artists. Indeed, this project will present contemporary materials as links to Belgian history, culture and artists of the past. It will give students access to a unique culture with different influences, mainly the French, the Flemish and the German communities living together in Belgium and each contributing to what Belgian culture represents. Therefore, artists from the three communities will be included in the repository.

The materials will be organized within a traditional MetaMedia archive, which will include the different themes around which the classes will be structured, and each theme will feature the artists most relevant to the theme being studied. The selection of artists within each theme is not exhaustive. This will allow students to make their own selection of materials to be included under a theme and to assume the role of an online curator creating different links between artists.

Advanced Chinese Reader

Development of a reader for fourth-year Chinese intended to meet students' interests in many different genres, topics, and periods of modern Chinese prose.

Development of a website with audio-visual materials for Spanish 202 (Advanced Spanish)

For the enhancement of Spanish 202 (Advanced Spanish), I propose the creation of a website containing clips from full-length and short films, and TV advertisements. The clips are related to the content of the textbook currently used in Spanish 202 but they could work as well with other textbooks and at other levels of instruction. The website will be accessible by Spanish 202 instructors only.

Form-focused Jeopardy Games for Business Chinese

This project aims to develop 20 sets of form-focused exercises in the format of the Jeopardy Games using Microsoft word and PowerPoint for the in-class use of Business Chinese (CHIN 382) in the spring semester. There entail two goals for this project: 1) to provide the opportunities for students to focus on linguistic forms in an engaging manner; 2) to prepare students linguistically so that they can perform the uncoming meaning-focused tasks more accurately, fluently and appropriately.

Creating Case Studies Teaching Materials for Japanese for Professions Classes

The objective of this project is to develop new teaching materials for Business Japanese classes, specifically, for the series of Japanese for Professions classes (JFP) which is currently offered at the University of Pennsylvania. The new materials employ the case method, which is frequently used in the business schools, but have just started to be adopted in business language classes. The project will include preparations of the materials, i.e., research of companies and situations and create cases which will become the foundation of teaching language materials.

Advanced Chinese Reader (cont.)

Editing of advanced reader.

Web-Based Proficiency Tests for Hindi

Development of Web-based proficiency tests for Hindi including fifteen versions of a comprehensive test for evaluating listening, reading, and grammar skills. Items will range from Intermediate High to Advanced High, and the tests will be used both for self-assessment and for evaluation by the teacher.