On June 11, Jinhuei Dai presented a paper, “Pointing Xiaobao: A Case Report of a 14-month-old Prelinguistic Baby’s Pointing Gestures,” at the Baby and Toddler Gesture Workshop, organized by the Linguistics Department of CCU (Chung-Cheng University) in Taiwan.
Archive for category GSTILE
Too often, the needs of English language learners are met with simplified curriculum and lowered expectations. What would happen if instead classrooms were organized to honor the promise of these students by increasing rather than decreasing the intellectual challenge of instruction, by increasing the support such challenge requires, and by increasing students’ active engagement with their own learning?
This book is the result of a decade-long effort in school districts to implement challenging instruction that is designed for classrooms that include English learners and that raises the bar and increases engagement for all learners.
Classroom vignettes, transcripts of student interactions, and detailed examples of intellectually engaging middle school and high school lessons provide a concrete picture of the instructional approach developed by coauthor Aída Walqui, founder and director of WestEd s Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) initiative.
Underlying the QTEL approach and giving it coherence and power are three strands of instructional theory – cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, and sociocultural learning theory. Coauthor Leo van Lier, internationally recognized author, linguist, and sociocultural theorist, lays out through clear and frequently wry examples just what these theories have to offer the classroom teacher, in particular the teacher of English learners.
MIIS was a strong presence at the recent CATESOL conference, reports TESOL professor Kathi Baliey. “An analysis of the recent CATESOL Conference program booklet revealed that even though we are a small school, and only one of many organizations in California and Nevada participating in the annual states-wide conference, nearly 12% of the non-plenary presentations were given by our team. I am especially proud of the current students who took the leap and submitted abstracts.”
Kathi also reports that our alumna, Belinda Braunstein (TESOL) just finished her term as CATESOL President, our alumna and colleague Patricia Szasz serves on the CATESOL Board, and our alumnus, Don Sillings (TESOL + LPA) is CATESOL’s professional business manager.
Congratulations to Pablo Oliva, who received the 2010 Allen S Griffin Award for teaching excellence. The award was established n 1982 by a bequest from the late Col. Allen S. Griffin, former publisher of the Monterey Herald and founder and former president of the Community Foundation. The Griffin award honors teachers on the Monterey Peninsula with a record of sustained excellence in the classroom and significant impact in the community.
Who: Ulrike Irmler, Microsoft
When: Monday, April 5, 2010 from 2-4pm
Where: Irvine Auditorium, MIIS
Microsoft Windows covers a breadth of audiences from consumer, to IT professionals to developers. With more than 1 billion customers worldwide and 100 target languages, translation and localization activities span from user interface localization to digital marketing, developer kits, licensing agreements, and many other text and domain types.
Ulrike Irmler, who manages Window’s localization team, will give an overview of the Windows business by presenting several end-to-end localization scenarios (user interface, web content, developer and consumer). She will focus on market-strategy, translation challenges, standards and linguistic quality. Ulrike will also discuss the latest translation paradigms such as machine translation and crowd sourcing in the context of large-scale enterprise localization.
Who: All Students
What: Visiting scholar, Shirley Brice Heath, shares her recent research
When: Friday, March 19, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Where: MG 100, Monterey Institute of International Studies
Moving the human eye and mind: Visual, musical and literary arts in grounding cognition
Shirley Brice Heath
Economically advanced nations currently reflect a curious twist in reasoning. In spite of strong historical support for parallel economic and aesthetic development in the history of modern Western nations, education systems in many nations today are reducing art, music, and literature in their curricula. Teachers of the humanities and arts hold less prestige than their counterparts in the sciences and mathematics. The inextricable links between the development of science and advances in aesthetic creativity go unnoticed in current arguments for denying opportunities to learn creativity, work across media and modes, and develop expertise in visual perception and renderings of imagination in sketches, drawings, and models. Technological advances make imperative the “reading,” embodying, and creating of images to such an extent that neuroscientists now see these ways of learning as grounding cognition. This lecture considers these research findings in terms of implications for human learning across the life span.
On March 8, Dr. Kathi Bailey (GSTILE) will fly to Dubai, where she will be a plenary speaker at the TESOL Arabia Convention – a regional conference which draws attendees from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt.
Bailey will give a plenary presentation on innovation in language teaching, lead a one-day workshop on classroom research methods, chair a colloquium about research on English language teaching and learning in the region, and report on a survey of language program administrators’ responsibilities.
Sharad Joshi (MonTREP) was interviewed recently by KGO Radio San Francisco, an ABC affiliate, on the ongoing offensive by U.S. and Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan.
Johan Bergenas (CNS) had an article published in the Guardian on U.S. response to Iran’s “nuclear trickery.”
Jinhuei Dai (GSTILE)was invited to present her proposed presentation “Green Business in China: Curriculum Development” in March 2010 at The Third Business Chinese Workshop hosted by The Ross School of Business Center of International Business Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her collaborative paper with a recent MIIS alumni, Valkyrie Anderson, “Gchat and Facebook Chinese and Technology Acquisition: Perspectives from a Teacher and a Student, or Who is the Learner” was accepted by The Sixth International Conference and Workshops on Technology and Chinese Language teaching in the 21st Century.” She was also invited to present her work on pointing gestures of infant communication at a symposium this summer in Taiwan.
GSTILE student Simone Bonneville (MACI 2011, En, Ru, Fr) is interning as an escort interpreter at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. Assigned to interpret for the team of athletes from Tajikistan, Simone is putting to her consecutive interpreting training during her first year at MIIS to good use. Follow her adventures as a National Olympic Committee Assistant on her blog.
Uwe Muegge, Chair of the Translation and Localization Management Program, is currently one of three authors featured on the home page of the German professional association for technical communication and information development (tekom). tekom is Europe’s largest professional association for technical communication.
Muegge’s article is titled “Controlled language – does my company need it?” and provides an introduction to this relatively new approach to standardized writing for improving the readability – and translatability! – of technical documents.