October 2014

GSL Systems Administrator Jeff Pearlin gave a guest lecture in MIT’s “Globalization: the Good, the Bad and the In-Between” class on Heavy Metal music as globalized music. The lecture focused on heavy metal as a globally identifiable form of popular music and its forty-year history of cultural assimilation of regional musical traditions and conventions. (October 7).

GSL Lecturer Leanna Rezvani presented “Teaching La Princesse de Clèves: A Web-Based Approach to a Seventeenth-Century Text” at the Society for Interdisciplinary Seventeenth-Century French Studies Conference in London, Ontario. Rezvani also presented “Virtuous Heroines, Conniving Heroes, and Exemplary Endings: Striking Similarities Between the Heptaméron’s 10th Tale and La Princesse de Clèves” at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana (October 18).

Min-Min Liang, GSL Lecturer, presented “Responsive Classroom Approach Student-centered Teaching and Learning,” at the New England Chinese Language Teachers Association, Boston, University of Massachusetts Boston (October 4). She also presented “Using Authentic Texts to Teach Anchor Standards in K-8 Mandarin Language Classrooms,” at the First Chinese Language Teachers Association International Symposium on Chinese Language Teaching and Learning, Bloomington, Indiana University (October 24).

Senior Lecturer Haohsiang Liao gave a keynote speech at the 2014 Conference on Theories and Practicum of Chinese Language Pedagogy at the National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology in Taiwan on October 17. His talk was entitled “W.H.O.M.: Ten Years of Pedagogy and Beyond.” He also conducted a pre-conference workshop on “Materials, Methodology, and Teaching Manifestations” on October 16.

Senior Lecturer Sabine Levet gave a talk, “Getting students to collaborate online with Google Forms, WordPress, Wikispaces and Skype/Google Hangouts,” at the NERALLT 2014 conference “Technology for language education: making need-based and pedagogy-driven choices” at Brown. (October 23). Levet also gave a guest lecture on Cultura via Skype to students at University of Potsdam, Germany. These students focus on “Comparative Social Policies revisited by Gender”, and publish on the blog News Activist, which is a global network of collaborating student writers. (October 30).

On October 23-25, 2014, GSL was well represented at this year’s Massachusetts Foreign Language Association Conference (MaFLA), held in Sturbridge, MA. The following talks were given at the panel “Blended Learning”:

  • Dagmar Jaeger “Literary Texts in the 21st century classroom”
  • Margarita Ribas Groeger “Digital Tools for Developing Communicative Fluency Beyond the Language Classroom”
  • Mariana San Martin “Developing linguistic and cultural competence through digital environments: Practical applications of technology in the second-language classroom”

November 2014

Senior Lecturer Takako Aikawa presented at the American Translators Association (ATA) Conference in Chicago “Is Machine Translation Your Friend or Foe? Challenges for English>Japanese Translators” (November 8).

GSL Lecturer Min-Min Liang presented “Designing Assessments through Authentic Texts and Performance-Based Tasks” at the Workshop for American Council on The Teaching of Foreign Languages Annual Meeting, San Antonio, Texas (November 21). She was also panel organizer, and presented “Responsive Classroom Approach” at the panel Improving Accuracy: Speaking, Grammar and Writing at the same conference.

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