Department of German

"Supporting teacher-researchers in a comprehensive curriculum renewal project in a college foreign language department."

In July 2000 the Department was awarded a grant from The Spencer Foundation for its project "Supporting teacher-researchers in a comprehensive curriculum renewal project in a college foreign language department" within the foundation’s "Practitioner-Research Communication and Mentoring Grants" program. Heidi Byrnes and John Norris are co-principal investigators and faculty mentors for this two-year grant; Graham Crookes, The University of Hawai’i, serves as external consultant and expert, and Lourdes Ortega, Georgia State University, serves as the third faculty mentor/consultant.

The grant affords the opportunity to build on the experiences of the curriculum project and to pursue the following goals and objectives within an overall teacher-researcher focus:

* frame and value the work done within the curriculum renewal project in terms of major questions regarding college-level FL learning and teaching;
* connect with the discourse of the larger research and practitioner community in order to enable them to contribute to the professional discussion in various media and fora;
* conceptualize research projects that have substantive washback effect on curriculum and pedagogy and use to greatest advantage the integrated curricular context of their work in order to investigate claims about the most effective and efficient instructional approaches for language learning;
* acquire knowledge and research expertise for conducting ecologically valid classroom-based investigations that address important questions in research and pedagogy and link the interpretations of results to programmatic issues, pedagogical practice, and professional development.

Research foci that are being pursued are:

(a) re-conceptualizing upper-level language performance (the curriculum’s levels III-V) in terms of various reading, speaking, and writing tasks that would address the particularly fertile relationships between the expression of complex content and academic language use; (b) reconsidering the teaching of speaking and writing and the implications for various course-based and curriculum-oriented assessment practices; ("EVALUATION PROJECT")

(c) evaluating a rich existing data base of spoken and written language at all instructional levels for various micro-issues pertaining to language acquisition and for their implications for potential curricular and instructional adjustments; ("PERFORMANCE DATA ANALYSIS")

(d) reorienting conceptualizations of teacher education (e.g., that of the graduate TA’s), and also of teacher development and professionalism of faculty at all career stages in light of curricular, departmental, and professional renewal. ("TEACHER DEVELOPMENT")

Year One Activities

* Initial workshop, October 6 and 7, 2000
* Three project-specific workshops offered by researcher-mentors, focused on speaking and writing and performance data analysis for various interlanguage phenomena (e.g., discourse phenomena, lexical acquisition, syntactic information, accuracy, complexity)
* Ongoing consultation between mentors and teacher-researchers on the chosen foci
* Institution-internal presentations on the ongoing research.
* Submission of proposals for conference presentations

For further information, contact Heidi Byrnes or John Norris.

September 1, 2000