CeLCAR orgonized and hosted Workshop on Online LCTL Teaching on Friday, May 22, 2015 at the IMU Memorial Union! Teaching less commonly taught languages has always had its own set of challenges, and here at Indiana University, for the first time, we will discuss possible solutions with special emphasis on online solutions.

Öner Özçelik, Dave Baer, Amber Kennedy Kent, Rahman Arman, and Sukhrob Karimov, Indiana University

Towards Developing Online Language Courses for LCTLs: The case of Central Asian languages. Here at CeLCAR, we have spent the last year and half preparing course materials to teach less commonly taught languages online. Specifically, we have been preparing materials for online courses in the Central Asian languages of Dari, Mongolian, Pashto, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Uzbek. We will discuss our development journey and demonstrate some of the distinctive features of our results to date. The points of discussion will be our general direction, administrative issues and solutions, issues of instructional systems technology and pedagogy, concerns and lessons learned in instructional design and online and mobile applications, and problems encountered and solutions applied to two specific languages, Dari and Pashto.

Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl, Yale University

Maintaining the diversity of LCTLs: Toward sustainable models. Over the past decade, budgetary constraints and institutional pressures have forced many institutions to drastically reduce the number of foreign languages they offer, and this has especially—though not exclusively—affected the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs). It is essential that we maintain the diversity of languages at our institutions, but this will require adopting creative and innovative approaches to language instruction that go beyond the existing curricular and departmental models. In this talk, I will provide two examples of sustainable models that can help institutions maintain the breadth and depth of LCTL instruction.

The first example is the Directed Independent Language Study (DILS) program, which allows students to learn languages that are not taught within the regular language departments. In the past 15 years, the program has offered about 90 of the least commonly taught languages (including Native American languages) and has more recently begun to use distance technology to connect students with qualified instructors in hard to find languages. The second program I highlight is the Shared Course Initiative, a collaborative project among Yale, Columbia, and Cornell to share instruction in the less commonly taught languages via a synchronous, classroom-to-classroom videoconferencing model. We currently offer approximately sixteen of the least commonly taught languages (such as Classical Tibetan, Sinhala, Romanian, and Zulu), with levels ranging from beginning through advanced. In my presentation, I will outline the challenges and benefits of these programs and suggest ways in which institutions might create new opportunities for the study of LCTLs.

Sun Shin, Indiana University

Using E-portfolios for foreign language teaching and learning. A portfolio has been known to be used as an informative instrument to provide an ongoing, cumulative record of language development. It can also help students to reflect on their learning and to promote the ownership of and responsibility for their learning. In recent years, Electronic (E)-portfolios, which allows teachers and students to collect and store language samples in multi-media types online, has received a large amount of attention. However, many foreign language teachers are still not familiar with the ways in which it can be used in their own classroom settings. In this talk, Prof. Sun-Young Shin will discuss some important concepts and procedures related to E-portfolios, and provide some examples of students’ foreign language use that can be selected and collected. Through this talk, participants will be able to know how they implement and use E-portfolios in a language classroom as a useful assessment and teaching tool.

Binbin Zheng, Michigan State University

Teaching practices and interactions in online world language courses. Online teaching and learning have become widespread with the emergence of the Internet and other new technologies. However, online environments pose new challenges to effective teaching practices and interactions among teachers and students, and this is especially true in the case of language courses. Using survey and interview data, this study addresses the following issues. (1) What teaching practices did language teachers adopt in online courses? (2) How did language teachers adjust their teaching practices from face-to-face to online teaching? (3) What kind of professional development had teachers received, and how did this differ from what they expected to receive? (4) How did teachers’ online teaching practices affected learner-learner, learner-instructor, and learner-content interactions? By addressing these research questions, this study intends to provide suggestions for online language teachers to improve online teaching, and enrich current research in online language teaching and learning.

Rick Kern, University of California, Berkeley

Looking beyond communicative competence: Developing semiotic agility in online (and offline) environments. In the current era of globalization and intense social and technological innovation, simply teaching normative language forms no longer offers adequate preparation to deal with the varied communicative contexts in which people work, learn, play, and shape their identities. On the other hand, we also sell our students short if we focus too narrowly on the latest electronic literacies. Rather than attempting to distinguish between "new" literacies and "old" literacies (linked to "new" and "old" technologies), I propose an approach that brings attention to relationships between current and past literacy practices in order to prepare learners for the future, emphasizing semiotic agility (Prior, 2010; Thorne, 2013). This approach involves reflection on how technologies and mediums influence the design of communication and embody values and fundamental ideas about what communication is. The presentation will develop a set of principles and goals for this educational approach, then propose ways to achieve those goals through a "relational pedagogy" that focuses on how meanings emerge from interactions among material, social, and individual resources.