Abstract

Three Models of Online Teaching; Tianwei Xie; California State University, Long Beach; Online teaching becomes more and more popular recently. However, not everyone is clearly aware of the model of online teaching. It is particularly difficult for those instructors planning to teach online to decide which model to adopt.; This presentation will introduce three models of online teaching: supplemental model, mixed (hybrid) model and complete online teaching model. Pros and cons of each model will be discussed. Characteristics of online teaching will be analyzed from the perspectives of teachers, students and course structure. The presentation will also show the sample models of some elementary Chinese courses.
: Enhance Your Teaching with WebQuests; Nien-Hsiang Chen; Harvard University; Abstract A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet. WebQuests can be long or short-term projects, usually involving group work. They are highly motivational, with students taking on special roles. Guidance on how students should organize and complete the task is embedded into the structure of each WebQuest. This sample unit was created because of its ties to the language and culture curriculum, the need to incorporate technology into the curriculum, the benefits it should have for the students, and the opportunities it creates for communication with Chinese people. This unit focuses on the most important goals for learning, knowledge acquisition and integration. Students are presented with a significant amount of new information. By using a WebQuest, students can focus on the process of learning and use the tools to engage and facilitate higher level thinking. Students can plan, research, synthesize and report in a more meaningful way and create a product that shows knowledge and skills. My personal philosophy for Chinese language education is that the two most important and useful skills to successfully learning Chinese are writing skills and becoming comfortable with speaking Chinese in everyday situations. Through this presentation and discussion, this panel hopes to encourage Chinese language educators to use a WebQuest as a tool in the classroom.
: ChineseNet: An Historic Inter-sector Initiative; Scott McGinnis; National Foreign Language Center; Since 1998, the National Foreign Language Center, with the support of a number of governmental and private funding agencies, has been developing LangNet, a WWW-based system designed to enable language learners to receive programming customized to their language learning needs and goals, and to promote equitable access to highly effective language programs on a national scale. While well over a dozen languages have been developing language-specific LangNet sites since at least 1999, the Chinese-specific ChineseNet initiative only began in 2001, making it the last of the "most-commonly-taught LCTLs" to commence development. In addition, while all of the earlier language-specific LangNets were initiated with either exclusive or at the least predominant content oversight by experts from the academic sector of the American foreign language teaching community, ChineseNet is unique in that its initial project team was almost exclusively teachers and technology specialists from the government sector, specifically the Defense Language Institute. This presentation will discuss the current inter-sector developmental situation, including the impending increased participation by academic sector specialists through the Chinese Language Field Initiative, and the implications for additional field-wide cooperation and collaboration among all Chinese language teachers in the United States.
: The Procedures and Challenges of on-line Curriculum Development; Tsengtseng Chang; Defense Language Institute, CA; As LangNet project writers, the presenters will focus on how to design a responsive on-line learning plan. The learning plan provides: 1) Advice and information (language/skill/level, effective strategies, context of study); 2) Learning objects (support one or more sub-objectives, relevant to a particular language level, skill, and competency, and tagged to all relevant user information). The learning objects include practice of the sub-objective based on a text, strategic activities relevant to the sub-objective, and assessment of achievement, or advice feedback; and 3) Other resources. The presenters will address the challenges and prospects of on-line curriculum design, and a demonstration of the learning plan will be included.
: Multimedia Courses' Testing and Design; De Bao Xu & Hong Gang Jin; Hamilton College; Along rapid development of technology in multimedia, a large number of researches have shown that multimedia, if well designed, can model and imitate interactive complex behavior and human system (Gardner 1985, McCarthy 1981) and therefore can be a dynamic and flexible tool to promote language learning in an interactive context. Such findings have presented new challenges to language teachers in rethinking their teaching methodology and restructuring their language curriculum. As a result, many multimedia materials and multimedia courses have been proposed, designed, and have been used in the Chinese language teaching field. However, how effective these multimedia materials/courses are in Chinese language teaching is an open question. There is also no real system to test the effectiveness of these materials and examine the designing ideas behind these multimedia courses. Hong Gang Jin and De Bao Xu, incorporating language-testing theory, will present a system for multimedia courses' testing, which can test the effectiveness of these materials and report the result of the effectiveness of these materials.
: Embracing the Digital Age--Using Live Video for Advanced Chinese Courses; Ling Mu; Yale University; Many advanced Chinese courses start to use textbooks with authentic materials such as newspaper items and readings on culture and society. To use live authentic video clips from Satellite TV programs as supplementary tools could help enliven an otherwise inactive classroom and makes students' language study more meaningful. By viewing authentic news items using vocabulary learned from the textbooks, students could attest their language ability, and in doing so get a sense accomplishment when they find they are able to understand the events that are currently taking place in China. Using video clips from live TV with news on current events, language learning becomes imperative as it turns into a real media to communicate and to learn. This presentation will demonstrate a simple way to capture TV video clips using a computer and ways to turn these video clips into substantial learning materials. I will show also the specific steps and software handling involving video capturing and editing, as well as the distribution of the final product either for the classroom use or for the viewing on the Web.
: A New Approach to Teach Chinese Characters; Der-lin Chao; Hunter College, City University of New York; The study of Chinese characters has been identified as especially difficult learning aspects for American students. The lack of satisfactory instructional materials to address these learning difficulties severely hinders students in the lower levels of our Chinese language programs. The end result of the frustration and discouragement students experience in trying to develop literacy in Chinese has been exceptionally high attrition rates in our upper-level courses.; The materials address these problems. From a language acquisition point of view, the learning of Chinese characters is ideal for Web-based instruction since these linguistic skills do not require a great deal of student-teacher personal interaction. These skills can be acquired by providing step-by-step instruction and interactive exercises on an instructional software program. The materials can easily be incorporated into regular lesson plans.; This set of Web-CDs and the accompanying materials will provide both teachers and students with a new, modern, and cost-effective way to learn Chinese characters.
: Technologically Enhanced Cultural Images as Visual Stimulation in Content-Enriched Chinese Language Teaching; Tek-wah King; Connecticut College; Despite findings supporting the benefit of visual aids in second language learning (e.g., Paivio & Caspo 1973; Webber 1978), the design and use of real pictures in college-level Chinese L2 teaching has generally been restricted to purposes of text and vocabulary annotation (with Kubler and Chi 1993 being probably the only exception), and is seldom implemented as essential classroom teaching device. Yet five distinguishing features of most fourth-semester Chinese language courses offered in North America suggest that L2 learners of Chinese would benefit from guided exposure to and study of culturally-enriched, authentic (albeit still) images designed not only to annotate the text but also to contextualize pattern drills and inform oral presentations: (i) Content-Enriched Instruction (Ball 1997); (ii) drastically expanded vocabulary; (iii) both syntactically and thematically organized pattern drills; (iv) longer, content-based oral presentations; and (v) linguistic and cultural need to transition to upcoming study-abroad period. This presentation will report the development of 32 theme-based image collages created by Photoshop (for lessons 9-16 of Integrated Chinese, Level 2, by Yao et. al., 1997), and the PowerPoint-based final presentation project that they lead up to. The hybrid approach this design assumes for technology use in L2 teaching will also be discussed.
: Joint Venture in China: A Task-based Simulation for Learning Chinese Business Language and Practice; Robert S. Hart & Hui-mei Hsu; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Joint Venture in China is Web-based, single user simulation software intended to teach Chinese business language and practice to high-intermediate and advanced level students of Chinese. The courseware helps business-oriented students to become familiar with the legal and practice issues of conducting a joint venture in China and, in addition, to improve communicative competence by incorporating business usages and simulated business settings. This presentation will focus on the initial module of this ongoing simulation project, in which the user selects a potential joint venture partner. Immersing the user in a simulated authentic task, this courseware has the following pedagogical significances. First, the communicative tasks provided by the courseware motivate the user to learn Chinese. Second, through direct encounter with the business settings, the courseware can broaden the user¡Ïs knowledge of the Chinese language in this specific context as well as familiarize him with the business culture in China. Third, the courseware can analyze each individual¡Ïs interaction pattern and give the user intelligent feedback.
: Web-Based Technology in Business Chinese Teaching; Fangyuan Yuan; University of Pennsylvania; Business Chinese is one the most popular courses among advanced students of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. Each semester, there are about 65 students enrolled with about 17 students in each class. The course objective is to advance studentsâ language ability in the business context and promote their understanding about China in economic terms. With the goal to enhance classroom teaching by maximizing studentsâ learning opportunities outside of classroom, a website ãBusiness Chinese On Lineä has been developed with the funding of Consortium of Language Teaching and Learning. This website can be described as course-based, user-friendly, easily maintained, and highly dynamic. Besides containing course information, learning tools and related links as most course-based websites do, this website also provides a collection of business correspondences, weekly economic news, and a chat room ãoffice-hour on lineä. For the second stage of the project, some web-based exercise! s will be designed, some management tools developed to keep track on studentsâ logon status and exercises scores, and students projects of excellence posted as exemplary samples for future students. In this presentation, the actual implementation of this website in business Chinese teaching at Penn will be introduced and studentsâ feedback and thoughts about future development will be discussed in lights of pedagogic concerns.
: Flashcards for Learning Chinese on the Web; Tao-chung Yao; University of Hawaii; Flashcards are a useful tool for students to learn Chinese characters and vocabulary items. Many teachers require their students to make their own flashcards, or to buy the flashcards if they are available. Now that we have entered the Internet era, flashcards are also start to appear on the Web. By examining the current websites for learning Chinese, one shall see that there has been a great interest in putting flashcards on the Web. Roughly, those sites can be divided into two groups: (1) traditional paper flashcards to be downloaded and printed; (2) electronic flashcards to be used on the internet. Within the second group, there are electronic flashcards that can be downloaded onto your computer, and also flashcards designed specially for Palm. Some of the flashcards let you practice individual characters and some let you practice words. Generally speaking, flashcards dealing with individual characters are for the general public to use, and flashcards dealing with words a! re designed to be used with certain Chinese language textbooks. In my presentation. I shall group those websites into different categories, and introduce some of the representative ones. I shall also comments on the merits of those websites, and offer suggestions.
: Task Types of the DLI Chinese Sustainment and Enhancement Online Course; Wen-chiu Tu; Defense Language Institute, CA; The DLI Chinese Language Sustainment and Enhancement Online Course combines a task-based approach with modern technology to facilitate interactive skill development in reading, listening and speaking for US military and government linguists stationed worldwide. This online course provides communicative tasks; encourages collaboration among peers via Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC); uses video conferencing to promote speaking activities and offers just-in-time grammar/glossary support. Authentic materials related to geography, culture, society, technology, science, politics, economy, security and military form the content of the lessons and modules. This presentation will demonstrate task types and discuss their pedagogical implications.
: Design of On-Line Listening and Reading Exercises; Shao-ling (Victoria) Wang; University of Hawaii; In view that web-based teaching and learning is getting more and more attention in the second language teaching and learning curriculum, this demonstration intends to show L2 Mandarin instructors to use web designing softwares to create easy on-line listening and reading exercises. In other words, web-based exercises do not need to be fancy but they can as well serve practical purposes in terms of improving studentsâ reading and listening proficiency. The presentation will be conducted in a lecture format with the demonstration of one of the most popular web design software-Dreamweaver 4. The participant will be benefited in finding how handy this software is to design on-line listening and reading exercises. In order to demonstrate the work, Iâ ll need a computer with Power Point, FTP, Dreamweaver 4, and Real Media program files. The target audience of this set of exercises will be second year level and above Mandarin learners.
: Writing Characters with the Word Processor; Zheng-sheng Zhang; San Diego State University; It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that due to constraints inherent in the foreign language learning situations, most learners of Chinese will not acquire functional proficiency in writing characters. We thus may have to question the wisdom of teaching character writing. This presentation explores the alternative of using word processors to produce characters. Learning characters is therefore reduced to the simpler tasks of phonetic input and character recognition. Recognition of static characters is necessarily easier than dynamic production, which involves such necessary details as stroke number, stroke order and stroke direction. Phonetic input not only sidesteps the problem of character writing, it also has many other benefits, such as better mastery of romanization, stronger sound-meaning connection and most importantly, greater confidence in writing Chinese. It may enhance studentsâ meta-linguistic awareness about the linguistic unit of word and the extent of homophony in Chinese. Students can also take advantage of much friendlier e-dictionaries to spell-check their own writing as well as to read pre-existing e-texts. Grammar check is also a distinct future possibility. Other advantages include easier editing, faster feedback and electronic transmission. For the teacher/researcher, e-text is an excellent way to collect acquisition data.
: Web-Based Speaking and Listening Tasks via Flash Movies and Videos; Phyllis Zhang, & Pao-Yuan Chen; Columbia University; We propose to present our experimental web sites that employ visual tools to support and supplement our classroom teaching. For the past two years we have been exploring possibilities of using multimedia-- mainly web-based exercises-- to enhance our teaching. In addition to exercises in various textual forms (by Mrs. Sobelman), we have also experimented with self-produced flash movies and video segments on the web. The results show that these web-based exercises can work effectively as a course component. This presentation will focus on two main areas. 1) Using visual stimuli on the web to generate activities which elicit the use of difficult structures or sentence patterns as well as practice narration skills for elementary and intermediate levels. 2) Using videos on the web to enrich the student's listening and speaking activities for advanced Chinese. We will demonstrate how these tools are used and their roles in teaching/learning processes. We will then discuss some advantages and limitations of both formats in their current state. It is our hope that the pedagogical implications underlying these will shed new light on our future instructional design.
: Web-based Materials and Exercises for Classical Chinese; Sue-mei Wu; Carnegie Mellon University; This presentation will discuss how to integrate Computer technology into the Classical Chinese curriculum in order to achieve more efficient and effective instruction. A brief discussion on the current status of Classical Chinese Pedagogy will be followed by a presentation of the motivations for integrating computer technology and web exercises with Classical Chinese courses. These introductory remarks will be followed by a demonstration of some prototype web-based materials, including Classical Chinese texts, reading comprehension exercises, vocabulary practice exercises, and grammar practice exercises. Accompanying the demonstration will be a discussion of the technologies used to create the exercises, the development process, and benefits and drawbacks to web-based presentation. Finally, the presenter will explain how these web exercises were integrated with a Classical Chinese course curriculum.
: Life and History in a Tianjin Restaurant: Making Chinese Culture More Accessible to Intermediate Students; Tong Chen; MIT; The site will consist of visual, audio materials and descriptive text based on the activities and clientele of a well-known restaurant in Tianjin, China. It will allow students to sample the views of owners, cooks and patrons about Chinese food on the one hand, and, on the other hand, about their experiences during some of the social and political upheavals that characterize recent Chinese history and account for so many present attitudes. And from the site, students will get to know some of Chinese geographical information. The site will also allow students, as they consolidate their knowledge of grammatical and stylistic structures and expand their vocabulary through the systematic presentation of their regular textbooks, to take incursions into a realistic Chinese environment, collect data, and make their own presentations (oral or written).
: An Authentic and Meaningful Integration of Technology in Chinese Language Instruction; Youping Zhang; Rutgers University; One commonly asked question about the use of technology in education is that what difference does the use of technology make? In language instruction, for example, the meaningful use of audio and video does make a difference. It has become an integral part of language instruction as it provides language learners with authentic target language input to improve their pronunciation, listening comprehension and their understanding of the target culture. The use of technology brings in a whole new perspective to language classrooms with the integration of computer and Internet in language instruction. With the development of computer language software and web-based language courseware, the same question of what difference does the use of technology make? needs to be answered. Is the use of computer and Internet in language instruction simply an ãadds-onä to the communicative language instruction? Can the authentic and meaningful use of computer and Internet become an integral part of language instruction? Can the use of computer and Internet take the place of a language instructor? With these question in mind, this paper will examine the Rutgers Multimedia Chinese Teaching System (http://chinese.rutgers.edu ), a web-based Chinese courseware that has been developed to provide instructional materials across elementary, intermediate and advanced Chinese; as well as the Rutgers FAS Digiclass (http://fas-digiclass.rutgers.edu), a university-wide language web site on which interactive exercises are posted for different language classes.



: A New Era in Chinese Computing and Education; Tonal Spelling for Ideograms-A Chinese Computer Natural Language; Victor C. Yeh. Sc.D.,; AlphaGram System, Inc.; A tonal spelling natural language uniquely mapped to the Chinese language, both in speech and in writing, has been established. Its name is Phonetic Chinese Language (PCL), . PCL serves as a natural language interface between Chinese ideograms and computer. In PCL each Phonetic Chinese Word (PCW) is uniquely defined for a given ideogram. The set of 10,000 PCW/Ideogram unique pairs is the standard database for the PCL System - a software platform.; A complete alphabetic accountability for the Chinese language has been established. Alphabetic sorting, listing, searching, matching, merging, information retrieval, database management, etc. are readily available to support a modern paradigm in Chinese language teaching. The highest possible readability and learnability for a natural language is achieved as a result of a complete linguistic solution that assures precise, concise and unique tonal spelling for ideograms.; The key to this success is a working alphabet for the tonal-homonymic Chinese language - the Phonetic Chinese Alphabet (PCA). PCA is a four-dimensional alphabet (consonant, vowel, tone and icon) . The 85-letter Phonetic Chinese Alphabet (PCA) offers two extra dimensions beyond the usual two dimensions (consonant and vowel) for phonetic spelling. These two extra dimensions are tone and icon. They jointly provide a total of 340 (4x85) tone and homonym resolutions for each and every sound syllable in Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua or Guoyu). The greatest obstacles for Chinese language to embark on a phonetic spelling form - tones in speech and homonyms in writing - have both found intelligent and elegant solutions.; Simplified script and traditional script share one common set PCW and alphabetic order. More important, PCL spelling represents equally well the monosyllabic classic Chinese and poems on the one hand, and the essentially polysyllabic modern Chinese speech and writing on the other hand. Most important, PCL is capable of spelling Chinese personal names without ambiguity.



: Code Conversion Issues in Chinese Computing: Characters and Pinyin Tones; Tianwei Xie; California State University, Long Beach; Chinese computing involves encoding characters. Chinese characters are encoded in GB (Mainland standard) and Big5 (Taiwan popularly accepted standard). Recent encoding standard of Unicode Consortium combines both standards. The latest Microsoft Word 2000 and Windows 2000 adopted Unicode standard for Chinese computing. Both simplified and traditional characters can be displayed in a same document. In addition, Chinese Pinyin fonts with tone markers (diacritics over the vowels) are also included in the upgrade font of Times New Roman, Courier New and Arial. With all these new developments, processing Chinese for teaching purposes becomes an easy job. However, opening the documents (with characters and Pinyin) created by older versions of Word or other word processors becomes a problem.; This workshop will introduce the concept of Chinese encoding and the ways of converting old documents to the ones readable by MS Word of newer versions using a popular Chinese word processor NJSTAR. The workshop will also introduce the ways of creating Macro files for MS Word. The Macro files will easily convert Pinyin with numerical notations of tones to Pinyin with standard tone markers. Converting various old Pinyin fonts to Unicode Pinyin fonts will also be covered. With these skills, the Chinese language teachers can easily convert all old unreadable documents and use them for teaching purposes.

: Photoshop: The Absolute Basics; Robert H. Smitheram; Middlebury College; This workshop is intended as an introduction to image manipulation using Photoshop, focusing on basic skills and important tips. Topics to be covered include: cropping and rotating images, basic color correction, basic selection tools, image file types with an emphasis on web deployment, and text tools with an emphasis on Chinese text.