Chat rooms for Slavic and other LCTLs

Fri Mar 21 18:08:19 UTC 2003

Dear colleagues:

Arizona State University Critical Languages Institute (CLI, http://www.asu.edu/cli) is pleased to announce multilingual chat rooms at http://cli.la.asu.edu/chat/chat.html available at our chat client. These chat rooms are devoted to Slavic and other less commonly taught languages in the area of concentration of the CLI (primarily the languages of Islamic rim). At present, the rooms allow chatting in the following rooms using Windows keyboard input with specific characters displayed in the following manner:

Albanian, BCS (i.e., introductory Serbo-Croatian), BCS2 (i.e., intermediate Serbo-Croatian), Bosnian, Croatian, Polish - they accept input in Windows Central European (windows-1250)

Russian, Serbian, Macedonian, Uzbek, Tatar - input in Windows Cyrillic (windows-1251)

Armenian, Arabic - input in Unicode (UTF-8)

CLI is making these chat rooms generally available, on an experimental basis. The chat rooms can be used by students and instructors of these languages. We are ready to add more rooms. If you have such need, let us know about the name of the room and encoding you would like to use. We would be grateful for comments at cli at asu.edu.

These chat rooms in their present form are a first stage in our plan to develop a distance learning and screened proficiency evaluation hub for less commonly taught languages. Contingent upon external financial support, CLI plans to address proficiency evaluation for less commonly taught languages using this Internet hub. CLI plans to maintain for these languages a pool of university instructors who will be interested in third-party anonymous evaluation of their students' proficiency level. The CLI will provide the necessary training to enable the instructors to serve as proficiency testers using the ILR scale. They would then engage in mutual evaluation of their students in which the CLI server administrator would be the only person to know the identities of the students and testers. The test takers and the tester, located at their respective universities, would meet on-line at the CLI server, and the evaluation would be performed. The hub would allow for both written and sound communication to perform this task. With this hub in place, proficiency level will be measured impartially and accurately.

Further work on this project, contingent upon external financial support, will consist of developing the capability of using other keyboard layouts and code pages, transferring sound and other files, chat rooms restricted to test takers and evaluators, etc.

This hub is one of the projects under CLI server services (see http://cli.la.asu.edu for more examples). We plan to add more tools, on-line and hybrid courses in the nearest future.

In this same connection, it may be of interest that CLI offers annual summer language courses for less-commonly taught languages, follow-up three-week immersion practicums at our affiliated institutions in the target countries (our newest addition features Albanian practicum at the University of Tirana, August 2-23, 2003), and a semester or annual study abroad program at our partner universities.

This summer we will offer introductory Albanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Macedonian, Armenian, and Tatar at the Arizona State University main campus (Tempe, AZ), from June 2 to August 1, 2003, with summer practicums in August and study abroad opportunities in the academic year 2003/4. All our courses are taught by highly qualified personnel, following a strict methodological framework based on the ILR scale and featuring ample information technology infusion.

[In the summer of 2004, we plan to offer intermediate level Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian while at the same time adding Polish to the CLI language offerings.]

CLI eight-credit-hour intensive courses come with a generous tuition waiver which generates more than a thousand dollars in savings for each enrolling CLI student. CLI students pay only a modest $300 application fee. Both the length and content of our courses enable FLAS, Fulbright, and other fellowships support funds to be used by graduate students pursuing summer language training in the CLI. A limited number of fellowships are available for Armenian and Tatar. We have simplified the CLI application procedures. Just go to http://www.asu.edu/clas/reesc/cli/onreg.htm and register.

As a regular feature of its summer session, the CLI also features topical workshops and one-on-one tutorials for those preparing grant proposals for study and research abroad.  For dozens of CLI graduates, these tutorials have yielded remarkable success in NSEP, Fulbright, Marshall, and other fellowship competitions. Other CLI graduates have now joined the U.S. Foreign Service or have taken international positions with major corporations.

If you have any further questions about our courses, please do not hesitate to contact us at cli at asu.edu or by phone at 480-965-7706.

Sincerely,

Danko Sipka, Associate Director

Critical Languages Institute

http://www.public.asu.edu/~dsipka

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