/ Hisako Murakawa / Professor
/ John Izzo / Professor
/ Charles H. Moore / Professor
/ Steven Tripp / Professor
/ Thomas K. Orr / Associate Professor
/ K. T. Christianson / Assistant Professor
/ Jerold A. DeHart / Assistant Professor
/ S. G. Lambacher / Assistant Professor
/ Willa D. Moore / Assistant Professor
/ Nan L. Washburn / Assistant Professor
The goals of the Center for Language Research (CLR) are to teach English to the students of the University of Aizu, a university that specializes in computer science and engineering, to design courseware based on a top-down education system, and to develop a computer-aided grammar dictionary.
Ten outstanding CLR faculty (one Japanese, the Center's director, and nine Americans) are teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses in computer science to students in pronunciation, listening and conversation, academic and technical writing, research methods, public speaking, intercultural communication, and standardized test-taking. All CLR faculty have at least four hours of office hours per week, and students are encouraged to practice their English conversation skills by visiting teachers. Sophomore students in 1994 began taking computer science and technology courses taught in English by English-speaking foreign faculty. Therefore, continual English training and preparation of students, both prior to and concurrent with these content courses, is an important CLR objective.
The Center has a computerized system, the Language Media Laboratory (LML), in addition to the commonly known Language Laboratory (LL) system. The LML was developed as a multi-media system on a computer workstation network. LML functions include voice analysis, transfer of voice analysis, and student guidance. Voice analysis consists of recording student voice data from various audiovisual devices and displaying voice patterns and pitches graphically. Transfer of voice analysis allows voice analysis data to be sent to the teacher's master console. Student guidance allows the teacher to monitor from the master console what each student sees, hears, and says. The teacher can guide students individually or as a group by sending them audiovisual feedback through a seat table interface.
To fully exploit the potential of the LML workstation system and expand its use into all four skill areas of English (writing, reading, speaking, and listening), the CLR is developing specialized courseware and teaching materials, including videotapes, audiotapes, and computer-assisted software. It is hoped that this will alleviate the paucity of computer science-related ESP teaching materials currently available.
As a group project with faculty of the Department of Computer Software, the Department of Computer Hardware, and the Center for Cultural Research and Studies, the CLR faculty will design and develop a cross-referenced English grammar dictionary in book and software form, to aid both native English speakers and non-native English speakers. This product will feature interactive software to help users employ syntactically, and pragmatically correct English grammar. To achieve this ambitious undertaking, a corpus of data from Japanese writers and speakers is being gathered to determine syntactic and semantic rules that can best assist non-English speaking academic and technical writers and scientists. It is a long-term project, but one certainly worthy of the CLR's efforts.