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MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 2008
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AROUND CAMPUS
Resource center helps students learn new languages
BY SACHIKO MIYAKAWA
smiyakawa@kansan.com
Memorizing vocabularies and grammar rules and listening to a dialogue on a DVD — that's one way to study a foreign language. Students
can also explore different cultures and boost their foreign language skill by watching foreign films and news programs.
Multimedia resources of the Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center, or EGARC, will add variety
to the way students learn foreign languages and cultures.
EGARC is located on the fourth floor of Wescoe Hall. It includes a computer lab and two classrooms that provide language-learning tools and DVD/VHS players. Students can use the rooms when class is not in session. EGARC also lends out digital equipment to instructors and students. The equipment includes digital cameras, iPods and voice recorders.
Jonathan Perkins, director of EGARC, said the center served to support students and instructors of humanity courses through the use of technology.
EGARC stores a variety of DVD and VHS collections, including foreign films and educational resources about languages, humanities and social studies. The collection has more than 30 categories. Language and humanity departments selected the collection of videos and often use them for class. Students can check out a video overnight if it is not in use.
Perkins said EGARC's collection was stronger for European regions. For example, the Russian collection has more than 500 titles and the French collection has about 400 titles.
Gilles Viennot, Paris graduate student and instructor of French, said EGARC had a good selection of French movies, especially classic ones. He sometimes shows those films in his class. He said he encouraged his students to learn French through movies and helped interested students find movies at EGARC.
Viennot said most movies of the center had subtitles and could be a good practice for students' listening skills.
Viennot said students could learn French culture from a film and could find different values looking at the behaviors of characters. He said sometimes students found French films slower and less visually dynamic than American films.
"It's still challenging for first-year students to understand the language. You don't hear proper French," Viennot said. "Learning culture is important for them."
Perkins said 70 percent of EGARC's collection was on VHS. The center received a fund to buy more DVDs each year. He said he wanted to add more variety and also needed to replace VHS tapes with the same titles of DVDs.
"It's for language learners," Perkins said. "But I think anyone who's interested in the culture and the country, this is the way to get real information very quickly from the country"
program allowed them to adjust the speed if they found it too fast.
Students can also learn a foreign language and culture without going to the center. EGARC provides a world news program named SCOLA Satellite Service on its Web site. It offers five channels, broadcasting news and entertainment TV programs from different regions, including Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Perkins said this would be a good way for students and instructors to learn foreign languages because they could hear a live language. The
SCOLA stores programs for a week after their broadcast.
Perkins said since EGARC introduced the online SCOLA service in 2006, the program had been used for 440 hours, which he said was not much. He said he might have to discontinue the program if more people didn't use it.
"The visual is worth a million words, being able to see how they dress, what they do, what their actions are," Carlson said. "This is very useful."
For more information about the services of EGARC, check the Web site at http://egarc.ku.edu/index. shtml.
Maria Carlson, professor of Slavic languages and literature, used SCOLA to show a Ukrainian news program about neopagans' celebration in her Slavic folklore class.
She said the visual was effective for her students to learn about the subject although they did not understand Ukrainian.
— Edited by Elizabeth Cattell