FLEAT VI

Research experience can be extremely rewarding for undergraduate and graduate language students. It can broaden a student’s horizons and contribute to obtaining a future job. In this session, the presenter will discuss how a traditional Language Resource Center has been transformed into a modern multifunctional language center by integrating research components into its daily operation. A research community is formed to link undergraduate students, graduate students, language faculty, K-12 community and the Language Resource Center together with a common goal in mind, that is, to improve students’ global competency in an environment that is no longer confined to a physical classroom.

The Language Resource Center is home to six specialized language labs, two of which (the Faculty Development Lab and the Undergraduate Research Lab) are primarily focused on research. It is our priority to offer exceptional learning experiences to our students and teaching resources necessary for our faculty. Research projects are designed and implemented in a highly collaborative fashion which involves not only faculty, undergraduate, graduate students, but also the Center staff, and sometimes K-12 students. The connections are formed via lab time, audio/video production and by use of technology resources, such as online programs, and social networking. Our research topics range from study on dialectical variation in the Arab world to Japanese collocations and E-Learning strategies for vocabulary and grammar acquisition. The Language Resource Center plays a vital role as a hub in this endeavor. In the presentation, we will discuss how we manage research funding and research activities administratively at the Center, and how other Center facilities come into play. Sample activities and materials, students’ reflections and faculty testimonials will also be shared with the audience.

Since its inception in the wake of World War II, the language laboratory has struggled to contend with the vagaries of rapid technological change. With the rise of inexpensive mobile devices, ubiquitous wireless connectivity and a dizzying array of cloud-based applications, the language laboratory finds itself once again in danger of becoming a repository of underutilized technologies and multimedia resources. Yet this democratization of technology also provides the opportunity to escape the obligation of maintaining technological infrastructure. With this new cognitive (and financial) surplus, the language laboratory can now forge partnerships with language instructors focused on the production of Open Educational Resources (OER), broadly defined as materials distributed to the public at no cost.

This presentation will highlight work on Mezhdu nami (mezhdunami.org), a complete curriculum for first-year Russian organized around the experiences of four American students spending an academic year in the Russian Federation. The curriculum is the creation of faculty at three universities (Brown, Portland State and Columbia) working in close collaboration with the staff of the Academic Resource Center at the University of Kansas. It includes a multimedia-rich online textbook, a workbook in both paper and electronic formats, and a host of teacher materials, including lesson plans and sample tests.

As part of a larger group of OER projects, Mezhdu nami has helped to create an ecosystem that fosters both voluntarism and inter-institutional collaboration, allowing the project to be completed using existing budget lines. It provides a platform to train the first generation of born digital instructors and an opportunity for hands-on technology training for undergraduates. The production of these types of materials has also served as a catalyst to improve online teaching and to reconsider the nature of the 21st century classroom.