Funding

  Project Proposal:
  Electronic Language Materials Archive (ELMA) for First- and
  Second-Year Spanish and French (First-year)

  Participants:
  UCLA, UCSC, UCSB, UCI, UCD

  Principal Investigators:
  Randal Johnson (UCLA)

Traditionally, the foreign-language curriculum has been driven by a preoccupation with explicit grammar instruction. Recent advances in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) field have helped shift the curricular focus in favor of meaningful communication with the concomitant effect of engendering a more student-centered, rather than teacher-centered, classroom. Content-based foreign-language learning, or the concurrent teaching of academic subject matter and second language skills, represents a clear manifestation of this trend. As students closely interact with authentic cultural materials they gradually develop grammatical competence. The simultaneous acquisition of a second language and cultural knowledge is effective for many reasons. Well-chosen content motivates students, its analysis strengthens interpretative skills and it provides captivating illustrations of how language is used in real life. The burden of preparing a large bank of interesting cultural materials and effective grammar programs might explain why there exist so few instantiations of this new approach. Content-based instruction requires extra work from the language instructor because this approach deviates from the standard textbook fare served up by publishing houses, which tend to concentrate on grammar alone.

This proposal seeks to enhance the UC language curriculum for first- and second-year Spanish and French by implementing a Web-searchable Electronic Language Material Archive (ELMA) that can be used to customize syllabi according to content-based learning practices. The instructor will only need to search the archive for topics of interest to create a customized syllabus. For example, an instructor at UCSB who needs to teach a unit on the Spanish preterit/imperfect contrast would also like to engage students in the study of medieval Spain. The instructor uses multiple keywords to search the archive using the content keyword "medieval Spain" and the grammar keyword "preterit/imperfect." An inventory of content, including readings, video clips and audio material appropriate for this unit will appear. The content will be accompanied by a battery of activities aimed at activating previous knowledge, organizing information, developing interpretive skills and generating class discussion. This archive will be entirely flexible and open-ended. The content area "medieval Spain," for example, could be accessed with the grammar keyword, "the conditional," or another content subset, such as "women," and retrieve a different group of activities. Likewise, the grammar keyword "preterit/imperfect" could be linked to a different topic such as "Spanish Civil War." In either case, the activities needed to make the content immediately accessible will already be laid out, saving valuable planning time and enriching the curriculum with multimedia materials that promote the learner's active engagement with the target language.

Annually, ELMA will have an immediate impact on the instruction of approximately 10,300 beginning and intermediate French and Spanish students. (UCLA Spanish serves 3600, UCD Spanish 3000, UCSB Spanish 1550, UCSC Spanish 1500, UCLA French 1500, UCI French 675). Readily portable to other languages, ELMA will serve as a model for other UC campuses and departments to emulate.

  Nature of the Collaboration

The project will involve the following participants:

* Professor Randal Johnson, Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA
* SOE Lecturer M. Victoria González Pagani, Language Program, UCSC
* Professor Robert Blake, Department of Spanish and Classics, UCD
* Dr. Susan Schaffer, Lecturer, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA
* Dr. Tim McGovern, SOE Lecturer, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UCSB
* Dr. Kim Jansma, Lecturer, Department of French, UCLA
* Dr. Elizabeth Guthrie, SOE Lecturer, Department of French and Italian, UCI

This proposal constitutes a pilot effort at intercampus collaboration. For the first time faculty from different UC campuses will pool resources to create a multimedia archive. All participants have experience working with content-based instruction. The curriculum SOE Lecturer González Pagani created for UCSC (Spanish Topics 1-2-3) offers a clear illustration of this approach. Other examples include Professor Blake's collaboration with González Pagani on several content-based projects, Dr. Jansma's creation of numerous French language courses that focus on cultural content, and Dr. McGovern's and Dr. Guthrie's plans to implement the content-based approach in parts of their programs in Fall 2001.

The archive itself will draw on the extensive collection of Web-based materials already developed by the five participating campuses (UCLA, UCSC, UCD, UCSB, UCI) under the auspices of their respective Offices for Instructional Development and, in some cases, supported by grants, such as FIPSE. To cite some examples:

* SOE Lecturer González Pagani has developed a vast collection of authentic materials in several media formats and Web-based activities for UCSC's Topic Oriented Spanish first-year curriculum. She is currently developing a cutting-edge digital Dynamic Grammar for Spanish.
* Professor Johnson and Dr. Schaffer have created numerous Web-based activities centering on Hispanic culture, some of which involved the collaboration of Dr. McGovern. Johnson and Schaffer are currently developing a series of self-diagnostic quizzes for Spanish and electronic modules, featuring video clips from Univisión programming, for Spanish grammar instruction.
* Professor Blake has developed a comprehensive CD-Rom product, titled Tesoros, that is currently used in first-year Spanish instruction at UCD.
* Dr. Jansma has created a wide array of Web-based activities that target culture, grammar and composition for French students. She has also produced a series of video clips didacticized for teaching orality and indirect speech.
* Dr. McGovern has crafted Web sites for Spanish and Portuguese language instruction that feature culture and, in particular, activities for using film in language instruction. He is currently working on adapting Professor Dorothy Chun's Cyberteca program, originally created for German, to be used in Spanish language classes.
* Dr. Guthrie has applied for a UCI Division of Undergraduate Education grant to fund an effort to locate and prepare Web materials for use in a new content-based curriculum for second-year French.

This project represents a significant improvement in foreign-language pedagogy at the system-wide level, which is currently fragmented. Participants will create templates to shape our raw material into an exportable and searchable Web site that all UC campuses may use locally to implement content-based instruction. Guidelines for implementation of these materials will also be included. The archive will be housed at UCLA and maintained by the Center for Digital Humanities. CDI and UCLA's New Faculty Media Center have agreed to provide technical support. Although hosted by UCLA, the archive will be fully exportable for local use as a complete Web site to any UC campus and beyond. Faculty from other campuses will be invited to contribute their materials, reworked according to the project's guidelines, in exchange for use of the archive with an eye to expanding the entries of the archive even further. In addition to the immediate usefulness of this material for the participants, we plan to give workshops and demonstrations to teach TAs and other "uninitiated" instructors how to use authentic materials and technology effectively.

  Project Goals

The main goal of this project is to foster curricular reform in UC Spanish and French language programs through creative collaboration. We intend to do this by using technology to incorporate content-based instruction through the use of authentic materials. The searchable archive approach creates categories of learning materials that can be expanded continuously. ELMA will be indexed and accessed by theme, topic, type of activity, rhetorical function, etc. Its materials can be easily re-used for different courses or student populations simply by choosing different resources in the archive or re-purposing their use.

Our goals can be summarized as follows:

* Design guidelines and templates for all Web-based materials.
* Adapt existing Web materials from the participating campuses (UCLA, UCSC, UCSB, UCI, UCD).
* Leverage the advantages of the Web's multimedia capabilities in the preparation of these Web pages.
* Provide a searchable linked index for a Spanish and French content-based archive.
* Create a repository for these Web-based materials at UCLA.
* Export the archive to other UC campuses for local use.
* Give workshops on how to use the archive for media-enhanced teaching.
* Expand the archive through use and continued participation of UC campuses.
( Create curriculum-linked templates for participating programs that may be adapted to existing programs.

Key benchmarks for accomplishing the goals of the project are as follow:

1. Fall 2001 Participants will meet to design the templates for standardizing existing materials and to define a network of categories that will be used to access materials in the archive. We will also meet with technical experts from CDI and FNMC to help us design the searchable archive. Finally, we will work with Project Evaluator Russell Campbell to ensure that assessment tools and procedures are in place.

2. Winter 2002 We will hire three GSRs to assist us in creating prototypes for the templates. We will identify existing materials for which copyrights have already be secured and, with the help of the GSRs, begin re-shaping and re-purposing our activities in accordance with the templates. The GSRs will also be assigned to secure copyrights through fair use laws for those activities that do not yet have them. Participants will travel to other campuses to demonstrate their existing materials and discuss how they can be integrated to meet the needs of different instructional contexts.

3. Spring 2002 Participants will complete the prototype for the templates and meet with UCLA technical experts to finetune the archive. The GSRs will assist participants in writing guidelines for use of the prototypes.

At the end of the first year, we will seek continued funds to populate the archive. We will also invite the UC Foreign Language Consortium to assist us in disseminating the archive. Participants will travel to other campuses to give workshops on how to use ELMA and to adapt materials to augment it. After two years, we will seek funding to collaborate with other UC language faculty to continue building the archive. We will also seek to export the idea of the archive and templates to instructors of other Romance and non-Romance languages.

  Project Evaluation

Professor Emeritus Russell Campbell from UCLA's Department of Applied Linguistics/TESL, and Director of the UCLA Language Resource Program, has agreed to serve as the Project Evaluator without remuneration. As the outside evaluator, he will prepare, circulate and tabulate results from surveys and questionnaires. He will also periodically interview the participants and GSRs . Formative evaluation will occur at two key times during 2001-2002. First, after the templates are designed Professor Campbell will assess how effective they are in facilitating the re-shaping of existing materials by participating faculty. Second, once the workshops begin to train TAs and other faculty, Professor Campbell will assess how easily non-participants are able to use the archive and adapt their materials to the templates. Professor Campbell will submit a summative report by June 2002.

  Budget

We request $57,860 to enable us to create the archive described in this proposal. Of this amount $30,060 is earmarked for three Graduate Research Assistant salaries (for two quarters each at 50% time). To promote collaboration and control costs, participants will work together with the GSRs as indicated in the attached itemized budget.

On behalf of UCLA's Center for Digital Humanities, we include in the budget the amount of $20,000. CDH and UCLA's Faculty New Media Center have agreed to costsharing, as described in the itemized budget. This project bears a number of similarities with others that are affiliated with CDH. The Heritage Language Reading Template Project, under the general tutelage of Professor Russell Campbell, foresees using a database and templates for teaching reading online. This database will have enough flexibility to store, categorize and link all variety of learning modules and exercises. Another similarly designed project being developed by CDH is the Web-based Language Assessment Project, spearheaded by Professor Lyle Bachman of the Department of Applied Linguistics/TESL. The WebLAS specifications call for a systematic, research-informed way to design and present testing materials digitally, and for creating research-quality data on the results. The similarities between the archive proposed here and the two projects just cited will allow CDH to pool its resources to provide the best possible end product for each project.

We include $6,600 in the budget to cover travel costs. Participants will meet in Fall 2001 to design the templates and to determine how ELMA will most effectively work. Subsequent meetings will be convened in Winter and Spring 2002 to continue program development and to move toward implementation. Individual participants will also travel to other campuses to demonstrate their own activities in an effort to help others adapt them. Finally, a small amount is earmarked for participants to travel to other campuses in Spring and Summer 2002 to give training workshops.

A total of $1200 is devoted to duplication of materials and to supplies, to be divided among the five participating departments and UCLA's Language Resource Program (for project evaluation).

  Plan for Continued Funding

As ELMA grows, individual participants will take advantage of resources available at their home campuses (e.g., UCLA's Office for Instruction Development) to continue working on their own projects. We also plan to re-apply for TLtC funds. As a group, we will need to seek extramural funding to support continued development. On the one hand, we will approach the recently created University of California Consortium on Language Learning and Teaching for its endorsement and support. On the other, we will develop a proposal to submit to such entities as FIPSE, the Mellon Foundation, and others to be identified in the future. Finally, we will pursue grant synergism with other universities that are creating programs that complement ours. For example, we will explore collaborating with the Language Acquisition Resource Center at San Diego State University.