Awards, Activities and Accomplishments

Awards, Accomplishments and Activities

Doctoral student Chan Lu has received the Jiede Empirical Research Grant from the Chinese Language Teachers Association to carry a project related to “The Properties of Textbook Characters and its Influence on Character Learning for Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language.”

Ph.D. candidate Yuki Yoshimura has been selected as the 2006 winner of the H&SS Graduate Student Teaching Award. Yuki also successfully defended her dissertation in Spring 2006.

Finally, congratulations to department chair G. Richard Tucker, the Paul Mellon Professor of Applied Linguistics, who has been named University Professor, the highest academic distinction Carnegie Mellon faculty can achieve.

Yuki Yoshimura is congratulated by H&SS Dean John Lehoczky as the 2006 winner of the H&SS Graduate Student Teaching Award.

To celebrate his nomination as a University Professor, the Modern Languages faculty, staff and students presented department chair Dick Tucker with the doctoral cap, gown and hood of his alma mater, McGill University of Montreal.

Other faculty activities, achievements and awards include the following:

Mariana Achugar’s article reporting on her current research project, “Writers on the Borderlands: Constructing a Bilingual Identity in Southwest Texas,” is in press in the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education.

Stephen Brockmann completed a book, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital, a cultural history of Nuremberg and Nuremberg discourse over the last two centuries. The primary focus is on Nuremberg as a “secret” German capital and the center of the German imaginary. Projected publication: late 2006 or the first half of 2007.

Charlene Castellano taught a new course on "A Century of Russian Film." This is the first course in the Russian Studies program devoted exclusively to film. While introducing students to film theory and criticism, this course surveyed the dominant directors, genres and works that have defined Russian filmmaking from its birth to the present day.

Kenya Dworkin implemented a community-based research course, "Service Learning in the Community-From Spain to Southwestern Pennsylvania: Immigrant Journeys." Using both Spanish and English, students focused on Spanish (Asturian) immigration to Southwestern Pennsylvania (Donora, thirty-five miles south of Pittsburgh, in the Mon Valley) where the students carried out historical, ethnographic and cultural research, and problem solving around the question of how best to document, interpret, preserve and disseminate community history and culture.

Barbara Freed continues to take great pride in her film "A Model for Matisse: The Story of the Vence Chapel" which this year won the Pierre Salinger prize for the best documentary and was shown at the Metropolitan Museum and The National Gallery of Art and at MoMA in March 2006.

Anne Green co-authored a textbook entitled Auf geht's! Beginning German Language and Culture published by Evia Learning. Auf geht's is a content-driven, complete curriculum for Beginning German language and culture that adopts an intercultural approach to language teaching.

Chris Hallstein presented a new paper, "The Disturbing Vicissitudes of German Perspectives on Poland in the 1930s," at an annual, interdisciplinary conference entitled "Europe at the Crossroads," sponsored by Loyola University of Maryland in Poznan, Poland.

Sono Takano-Hayes, with several of her students, presented a paper, “Web-based Instruction and Edugames: A Motivation Booster,” at the Japan Association for Language Teaching Computer Assisted Language Learning Conference at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan.

Yasufumi Iwasaki finished describing the usage of 29 English words and phrases for a dictionary of contemporary English usage, which was published by Sanseido, Tokyo in April 2006 under the Japanese title "Gendai Eigo Gohoo Jiten."

Chris Jones directed the rewriting of Elementary French 1 Online. This included designing, writing and supervising the production of a full semester of elementary French content, in collaboration with Sophie Queuniet of CMU and Heather Allen of Pitt, and acting as liaison with the funded Centers (Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center and Open Learning Initiative). This involved a video shoot in Nantes, France, using a local crew, profession actors and scripts created in collaboration with Sophie Queuniet.

Keiko Koda published a monograph, Insights into Second Language Reading, with Cambridge University Press.

Susan Polansky completed a book, The Poet as Hero: Pedro Salinas and His Theater (Newark, Delaware: Juan de La Cuesta-Hispanic Monographs, 2006). The work explores how Salinas, senior member of the Spanish Poetic Generation of 1927, turned in exile to writing plays and expanded significantly the social dimension of his work.

Sophie Queuniet offered a new seminar on the relation between the French School and Nation as it has played itself out in history, literature and philosophy from the end of the 18th century to 2005. The purpose of this course was to study education as both a personal and civic formation, to see to what extent citizens are shaped by a nation's educational measures, and to expose students to critical cultural issues related to historic and modern France. Sophie and her husband Phil Watts and their daughter Madeleine joyfully welcomed the newest addition to their family, Louise, who was born at the end of April.

Beryl Schlossman published new work on the poetry and poetics of Charles Baudelaire [the internationally celebrated early modernist writer, art critic, and translator], including “Baudelaire’s Place in Literary and Cultural History” in the new Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, edited by Rosemary Lloyd.

Naoko Taguchi’s article, “Comprehension of Implied Meaning in English as a Second Language,” was published in the Modern Language Journal.

Therese Tardio designed two new classes for Spring 06. The first, with Paul Eiss of History, is for the Humanities Scholars Program and examines the U.S-Mexico border and the 'invention' of the Americas. The second is a fourth-year class on gender and sexuality in Latin America and serves as a new addition to the Hispanic Studies curriculum.

Dick Tucker received a two-year grant from the International Studies & Research Program of the U. S. Department of Education to continue his work with Rick Donato of the University of Pittsburgh on “Literacy and early language learning” in the Chartiers Valley School District.

Michael West joined the Global Education Working Group that seeks to implement the charge by President Jerry Cohon and the Board of Trustees to globalize the undergraduate curriculum at Carnegie Mellon. As part of the process of planning for this globalization initiative, he attended a joint meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans and the Phi Beta Kappa society that focused on "Global Learning Models for Curricular Change and Faculty Development."

Sue-mei Wu serves as coordinator of the Elementary Chinese Online project funded by NSF through the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC). In addition, she is the project leader and the primary author of the Chinese Link: Zhongwen Tiandi textbook series published by Prentice Hall (their very first Chinese textbook. Elementary level published in 2005, and Intermediate level to be published in 2006).

Bonnie Youngs (with Chris Jones & Mirjam Hauck) participated in a joint project with our Fall 2005 Elementary French II class, the British Open University and the Université de Franche Comté during which all students communicated through CMC (synchronous and asynchronous exchanges). The exchange will be repeated in Fall 2006 with the French Culture students, with the possibility of adding Switzerland to the mix.

Yueming Yu presented a paper, "Chinese Ways of Thinking - how to teach them," at the Conference on Meeting the Challenge of Classroom Implementation - Content, Tasks & Projects at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.