Liling Huang wins first Cengage Learning Award for Innovative Excellence
Liling Huang, Lecturer of Chinese, received the Cengage Learning Award for Innovative Excellence in the Teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language administered by the National Chinese Language Teachers Association. Liling’s project “Self-paced Online Course of Chinese Pragmatics” was selected as the First Prize winner of the Cengage Award.
The project is the first self-paced interactive online course in the world for CFL learners that teaches pragmatics systematically. It takes an explicit pragmatics-focused, awareness-raising approach with the purpose of instilling in learners a sense of appropriate language use. Learners are exposed to rich pragmatic input through 3D animated stories and video clips of spontaneous conversations between native speakers. They practice performing speech acts in the human-computer interactive conversations in a game-like environment and further reinforces their knowledge through discourse completion tests. The technologies adopted in the online modules span in scope, ranging from embedded video quizzes through Kaltura and interactive speaking activities via voice recognition, to cartoons made by Animaker and tests created with Quizcat. The modules constitute the online component for Liling’s blended course, CAS LC 313: Chinese through Intercultural Communication. Liling is currently writing an article in which she documents the process of creating the course.
As stated by the CLTA Awards Committee, “It is the consensus of the committee that your project is both well conceived and innovatively implemented. Congratulations!”