Faculty: Jianhua Bai, Associate Professor of Chinese, Dept of MLL
Librarian: Barbara Thompson, Librarian and Technology Consultant
Course: MLL331: Topics in Linguistics
ESTIMATED PROJECT DATES:
- When will you start the project? Summer of 2002
- When will you complete the project? Fall of 2002-03
- When will you implement the project? Spring of 2002-03
PRODUCTS:
This proposal seeks funding to enhance the current course of Topics in Linguistics (Spring semester)
by strengthening students' library research skills and by adding additional features to the current
course web site. The revised course will help achieve the following goals more effectively: 1) To
develop students' research and analytical skills not only in the area of linguistics but also in
other areas of their academic research. 2) To use print and electronic resources, by compiling an
exemplary bibliography for linguistic materials, coupled with exercises that analyze the citation
and evaluate its authority. 3) To create an awareness and foster information fluency with non-text
information resources (software, sound files, video files). Our specific objectives to accomplish
are the following:
- Develop a web-based tutorial to help students with their research skills in linguistics. The
topics will include how to select a research topic that deals aspects of linguistics, how to
conduct library searches of articles, books and Internet resources, how to design and conduct
various kinds of research studies and etc. Students will be required to write a research paper for
the course of Topics in Linguistics and they will need to refer to this tutorial during the process
of their research.
- Develop a theme-based collection of supplementary reading materials as an exemplary
bibliography that reinforce students learning of the fundamental concepts and help students read
more extensively of articles of their individual research interests. There are many interesting and
informative materials on the Internet, but we need time to retrieve the relevant and reliable
materials from the vast "Junk Yard." We plan to gather the relevant and useful materials and
annotate them on my course web site for students' easy access. If the articles are downloadable and
if copyright permits we will down load them and put them on Eres. Otherwise we will build
hyperlinks to the materials for students to access. As a course home requirement each student will
be required to read 3 of the articles from this collection and write a critique/reflection paper
on each of the articles they read. The purpose of this assignment is to help students develop their
critical and creative thinking skills.
- Develop a web-based tutorial that assists students to make more effective use of the Internet
resources. For instance the speech analysis program, Praat (www.praat.org, a program for speech
analysis and synthesis from the Department of Phonetics of the University of Amsterdam) enables
students to do spectrographic analysis of speech sounds. It allows students to visualize the
acoustic structures of speech sounds and therefore achieve a better understanding of some of the
fundamental concepts of acoustic linguistics, which have not been covered during the precious years
when I taught the course. Another example of useful and relevant Internet resources is the
Concordance Program, http://www.rjcw.freeserve.co.uk, which can help students conduct lexical and
syntactic analysis of various languages.
All the above three components will be added to my current web site of the course of Topics in
Linguistics: http://www2.kenyon.edu/people/bai/linguistics.html.
Time line:
--- During the summer of 2002 Jianhua Bai will meet with Barbara Thompson and discuss the general
design of the project. And then Bai will spend some time revise the current syllabus of the course
of Topics of Linguistics to reflect the projected changes, and come up with the list of specific
tasks for the project.
--- During the months of September, October and November of 2002 the team (Jianhua Bai, Barbara
Thompson, the student assistant) will work together to develop the proposed projects. On a weekly
basis the student assistant will meet with Bai for pedagogical guidance and Thompson for technical
and library-skill guidance and then search (on the web and from library collections) for relevant
materials and develop the proposed tutorials. Bai will be responsible for "quality control" of the
content of the tutorial development.
--- The completed product will be incorporated into teaching of the course of Topics of Linguistics
during the spring semester of 2003.
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