Research on an international scale is supported by a new LARC-appointed faculty project lead, Dr. Steven Thorne, who will be doing research in Groningen, Holland, on the European and global contexts of developing transcultural competence and on the use of web with LARC. The portal will facilitate the type of research that requires multinational participation.
Thorne and Lyman-Hager will give a joint presentation introducing the project research portal at EUROCALL (European Computer Assisted Language Learning) in Bordeaux, France in Fall 2010 to kick off the project. Research by Thorne, in particular, undertaken during the year in Groningen will describe colleagues’ research in the field of social media and development of innovative applications whose purpose is to engage students in connecting across borders on deeper levels and using all-pervasive media. Thorne and Lyman-Hager, through the research portal, will also encourage partner teams to conduct joint research across national boundaries and to solicit participation in presenting at international colloquia and in undertaking joint research projects through connections developed in the portal. The portal will also serve as a place to post pre-publication research and papers given at professional conferences.
The project area activities take on a variety of new web 2.0 technology applications and challenges, including that of adapting content and approaches to emerging platforms such as the iPAD, and fostering new means of emphasizing and fore fronting transculturalism and translingualism through student engagement with peers. One such application is the WEB GLOSS authoring tool which is based on work by Lyman-Hager and Davis (1994). This application development is co-sponsored by SDSU’s CIBER for Hindi.
LARC is collaborating with the University of Arizona’s LRC in co-sponsorship of two Intercultural Competence Symposia in 2012 and 2014. We are also working with them on a Gaming Project – the goal of this project is to develop the approach (Arizona’s Jonathan Reinhardt will take the lead, with Julie Sykes of the University of New Mexico and Steve Thorne from LARC’s Transcultural project) in establishing a literacy and standards framework for pedagogical adaptations to games as language learning/literacy acquisition strategies. LARC’s primary focus will be gaming in the K-16 arena, building on the Fifth Dimension work done by University of California San Diego researcher Michael Cole, and we will focus on languages that complement the work of the University of Arizona group, namely Chinese (Wang/Cheng), Filipino (Idos/Alicio), Pashto/Dari (Saydee, Niasi), and Hindi (Graduate Student Teams, with Thorne).
More Information on Each Project Area
(1) Alternatives in Teacher Credentialing
(2) Standards Based Curriculum Development
(3) Developing Trans-cultural Competence
(4) Testing and Assessing Language Growth
