LARC

LARC works in collaboration with SDSU’s departments of language, literature and linguistics by hosting and providing language and culture resources to  students enrolled in these subject areas. LARC Materials include course texts, graphics, photos,  audio and  video that are posted online by language. Most of these course materials are intended just for SDSU language students. As faculty give us permission to use their materials, we post or link to them in related resource sites.  The LARC Materials includes materials for Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Mixtec, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

LARC Materials Link: http://larcmaterials.sdsu.edu

The LARC lab also maintains and supports site licenses for  language learning software which faculty are including in their syllabus and teaching.  Students build vocabulary and practice speaking by recording audio at their computer workstations, and then save it on a LARC  server for instructor review. Transparent Language’s BYKI electronic flashcards provides access to hundreds of card sets online and allows you to create your own sets for students.  Auralog’s Tell Me More software with 35 activities at all levels, six with speech recognition, and a variety of cultural texts, is available online in Western European languages and on CD’s in Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. Eurotalk, by the company of the same name, is available on every computer in LARC  for vocabulary building and oral skills practice in 17 languages.

The  lab uses LARC MOODLE as a course management system to support its courses and workshops for students both on and off campus. Faculty can also use a Computer Assisted Screening Tool called CAST to elicit student speech samples for evaluation. LARC continues to add more critical languages, dialects, and language levels to the existing CAST tool, as well as on-line authentic materials and media. CAST tests advanced level speaking proficiency for nine languages.