Language Resource Center Newsletter
2/25/04

First and foremost, we want to welcome our new CSL Director, Andrew Lian, and thank him for having given up the wonderful Australian weather to join us in Houston which as I had promised also has excellent weather!

We have had a busy and successful year. Thank you for your continuing interest, collaboration and participation. In this newsletter we will highlight the many good events involving the LRC, faculty and students.

New CSL Faculty Members

Welcome and congratulations to our newcomers for having their webpages available.

Victoria Surliuga
Tiqva BarOn
Peggy Patterson
Jin Lee

Technology workshops

Hajime Kumahata, LRC Language Technology Consultant, continues to offer a significant number of excellent workshops.

The most successful addition has been our own bulletin board, “Language Exchange Forum” using “phpBB”, an open-source bulletin board software.

This bulletin board can be used by all languages taught at Rice including those languages written from right to left such as Arabic and Hebrew. There are currently 492 registered users who have posted 2427 articles. Last semester 19 classes used the bulletin board, and we now have 13 classes using it this semester. This is an excellent way for students to practice writing or prepare for class discussions, while being involved in an engaging process.

ExTemplate 2.1

Congratulations to Eric Granquist, LRC Systems Administrator/developer, and Adam Bordelon, LRC student programmer, for having released the latest version 2.1 of ExTemplate. Since last September, Chao-Mei Shen, Meng Yeh, and Lilly Chen have been using the new program successfully with five Chinese classes. This semester, Brigitte Crull, coordinator of first year French courses, decided to give the French 102 sections their exams on-line for the first time. Thanks to our two able and dedicated Teaching Assistants, Emilie Dejonckheere and Natalya Stepanova who authored and administered the test using ExTemplate 2.1, the first on-line exam was a success. They will report on this procedure during our Technology Luncheon on April 21.

Language Placement Tests

Placement tests 2003, number of students taking the tests

New LRC Software and/or new features

• Office XP multilingual support
  Now available Word spellcheck and/or grammar check, thesaurus, translation dictionaries for Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified and Traditional, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
  
  Some of the above features are also available for Hindi, Polish and Russian.
  
  For more details, you can view the Microsoft Office chart.

• Ifinger dictionary: Oxford Spanish-English Concise dictionary
  This has been very popular amongst students as it allows them to browse the web or use Word and with just one click of the mouse to access translation.

• Wenlin
  Wenlin is now available outside of LRC from various campus computer labs. Jeff Wolfanger, our former Systems Management Specialist, created a Visual Basic application to enable students to access Wenlin, Chinese software, outside of the LRC. This new access is possible as we own sufficient licenses for this program. Students from 6 Chinese classes use this program regularly for their homework assignments.

• Tell Me More (TMM)
  Tell Me More (TMM), a speech recognition software program, is available in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. Soon to come is Arabic. It is available for beginning, intermediate and advance level, and therefore can be used by all CSL language students from first year to third year.
  TMM is currently used by 11 instructors in 20 classes. There are currently 787 users in the system. A significant number of students also use this program on their own to practice their pronunciation skills. A number of Rice faculty, staff, and alumni also come to the LRC to use TMM to practice their oral language skills before leaving for a short or extended stay abroad.

New Equipment

This summer, a new Media (audio/video) server storage system was installed. It provides us with more space, is faster, and is also more reliable and robust. It allows us to support 66 language courses, 46 CSL courses and 20 language department courses, or a total of approximately 500 video materials. It also supports the entire LRC audio collection required for 50 language courses offered by CSL faculty. Together these two collections occupy 1 TB of storage space.

Students Survey

During the Spring 2003, the LRC conducted a student survey. The survey was ongoing for one month and yielded the following results:

Students were asked to rate the LRC on a scale of 1 through 5, 5 indicating “strongly agree” and 1 indicating “strongly disagree”.

Survey results: 184 students participated

Below are the questions and ratings they received.

1. Student lab assistants are friendly and helpful, giving priority to student needs. 4.10
2. Lab assistants are knowledgeable about software and are able to help me in a timely fashion. 3.96
3. The equipment and software available in the lab satisfactorily meet my needs for completing language assignments. 4.49
4. Software, web applications (e.g. ExTemplate), and equipment all perform satisfactorily. 4.20
5. Media files (audio/video) play satisfactorily. 4.10
6. The atmosphere in the LRC is conducive to learning. I feel comfortable working there, and disturbances are minimal. 4.29
7. Information was presented in such a way that I gained a useful introduction to the LRC and available software. (Only if your instructor scheduled an orientation) 4.23
8. The lab is satisfactorily clean. 4.63
   
   The most common negative comment received concerned the fact that students wanted the LRC to be open for more hours. We solved this issue by opening the LRC 4 hours on Saturdays and making Wenlin available to students from other computer labs on campus.

We are also including here some positive comments from students:

• “ The range of software available in here is incredible!”
• “ The LRC is one of my favorite places on campus”
• “ I really enjoy the LRC. The resources available here help me learn a language more efficiently, easily, and enjoyably. If I could, I would simply sit there all day and use the programs and watch movies and learn to read, write, and speak all the languages available.”

As promised on the questionnaire, three students participating in the survey were chosen randomly and won a foreign feature film DVD. Thank you to students who participated.

Technology Luncheon

December 3, 2003

- Hyung-Jin Lee, “Use of TV commercials through ExTemplate in Korean language class”
- Tiqva BarOn, “A Hebrew e-Book for Beginners”
- Peggy Patterson, “Tandem Language Learning using Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)”
- Claire Bartlett, “Preview ExTemplate 2.1 - The Latest Release”

April 25, 2003

- Rick Spuler, “Of Readers and Directors: Making Sense (and Films) of Texts”
- Lilly Chen and Chao-Mei Shen, “Online Chinese Placement Test”
- Ombretta Frau, “Il Telegiornale”
- Dariusz Skorczewski, “Teaching Polish Language and Culture on the Web. A series of Multimedia Exercises for Beginners.”

Technology Related Presentations at Conferences

In June, several CSL faculty and staff will be giving presentations during CALICO 2004 at Carnegie Mellon:

- Hajime Kumahata and Claire Bartlett, workshop, “Experience Flexible and Integrated Web Authoring Environment With ExTemplate”
- Meng Yeh, Chao Mei Shen, Claire Bartlett, “The Effectiveness of Online Listening and Reading Exercises”
- Chao-Mei Shen, Jane Verm, and Hajime Kumahata, “Enhancing Student's Written Discourse with CMC: Intermediate Chinese and Spanish”
- Peggy Patterson and Susana Trabaldo, National Technological University, Argentina, “Negotiating for Meaning across Borders: Tandem Language Learning through CMC”
- Claire Bartlett and Hajime Kumahata, Courseware Showcase, “ExTemplate 2.1: An E-Assessment Solution for Western and Non-Western Languages”

Chao-mei Shen and Meng Yeh, SOCALLT 2004, “Technology-enhanced Chinese Teaching”

Hajime Kumahata, SOCALLT 2004, workshop, “Creating Multimedia Exercises with Dreamweaver's CourseBuilder”

Claire Bartlett, SOCALLT 2004, “Creating a Truly Multilingual Digital Environment for our Students.”

Hiroko Sato and Claire Bartlett, ACTFL 2003, Philadelphia, “On-Line Tool to Access all Four Language Skills in Japanese?”

Claire Bartlett, University of Virginia, October 2003, “Accountability: How Well and How Often Do We Assess Proficiency in All Four Language Skills?”

Claire Bartlett, University of Pennsylvania, October 2003, “On-Line Language Assessment: Testing all Four Skills?