Pilar Asensio and Ame Cividanes Attend NERALLT Conference

Conference:  NERALLT 2011 Spring Conference: Pedagogy and Technology: Collaboration between Language Faculty and Instructional Technologists in the 21st Century

March 24-25, 2011 at Connecticut College

Attended by: Pilar Asensio and Ame Cividanes

Recently, thanks to a CLS Travel Grant, Pilar Asensio and I presented at the NERALLT 2011 Spring Conference at Connecticut College.  Our presentation was entitled, “A Case Study of Communication Enhancing Technology Involving Language Faculty and CLS.”

Our presentation centered upon two projects we conducted here at Yale University in the summer of 2010.  We piloted these projects with a group of Yale study abroad students in an eight-week language and culture course we taught and collaborated with the Instructional Technology team of experts at the Yale Center for Language Study to assist in the technological aspects needed to conduct these studies.

We presented the following two projects in detail:

  1. The creation, design, implementation and results of a Facebook component in the eight-week study abroad immersion class.
  2. OPI Testing in an immersion program: Creation of project, questions used in the OPI test, and impact and results.

In addition to our presentation, we attended several other talks related to the theme of collaborations and synergies between instructional technology teams and second language instructors.

One presentation we found particularly interesting was given by Kellie Campbell and Prof. Hideko Furukawa from St. Michael’s College.  They spoke about Tegrity, a “lecture-capture software” and how they have successfully implemented this component in Prof. Furukawa’s Japanese class. In summary, they use Tegrity to record a class so that the students can then go back and see any of these classes for review purposes, especially before exams or other types of assessment. The professor highlighted the reasons why she wanted to use this software, one of which was concern that after the students leave her class, they have no exposure to the language. In order to increase contact time with her students, Prof. Furukawa now records different segments of her language classes and has them available for her students. This seems to be very effective in teaching grammar points. Overall, the integration of this “lecture-capture software” has been a very positive experience for the students and Prof. Furukawa underscored how it enhances independent learning.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *