NDLR Modern Languages’ Community of Practice

(1) Well, for those of you into iTunes, just to let you know our podcast series is now available there (in the iTunes Store) and you can suscribe that way if it’s easier for you. (Just search under “Modern Languages CoP”).

(2) Here’s an example of a Professor of Spanish (Western Kentucky University) trying her best to promote languages through podcasts.
http://www.wku.edu/modernlanguages/podcastseries/

(3) The Modern Foreign Languages Environment is supported by Learning & Teaching Scotland which is the national agency for Curriculum and for learning technologies in the Scottish schools system. They produce a series of podcasts on language learning and some other resources (including, for example, a royalty-free image bank) that might be of interest to those teaching ab initio courses or with an interest in teacher education.

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/mfle/

(4) Podcast Radio France also provides links and RSS feeds (a way of subscribing) to a whole series of programmes and information. http://www.radiofrance.fr/services/rfmobiles/podcast/

(5) For Italian, try RAI’s podcasts at

http://www.international.rai.it//podcast/index.shtml

Well, here is our first little podcast. If that last statement meant nothing to you, here it is in English:

Christina McDonald Legg (NUI Galway) interviewed Iain Mac Labhrainn today asking him to explain in basic terms what the National Digital Learning Repository is and how it is of use to academic staff in the Modern Languages community. If you want to hear this just click on this link.

You can click on the “subscribe” link down on the right hand side to use RSS feeds to subscribe to this blog and/or the podcasts (works in iTunes, Google Reader, etc). If you don’t know what this means, we’ll explain all in due course.

These days a common problem faced by many university language departments is recruitment of undergraduates. This has been an issue for some considerable time in the UK as well and the Language Subject Area Network has published a booklet entitled “700 reasons to learn a language” which is targeted at this recruitment issue. You can read it here by visiting the link below.

http://www.lang.ltsn.ac.uk/700reasons/700_reasons.pdf

Gifted linguists could have a different brain shape and structure from those of other people, a study suggests. … So says a  report by the BBC following recent studies of  brain scans.

Paul has been mailing as many of you as possible so that he can set up some contact pages as well as create accounts for you to access this site and the NDLR itself. I’m afraid he’s off sick this week and so apologies if you are still waiting for a reply. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible! However, I do know that he has had a lot of very positive replies and we’d like to take this opportunity to say how grateful we are for those. We will do our utmost to make this one of the most comprehensive language resource sites available. It will take time, but with your support we’ll get there.

Remember, this blog will be updated frequently, which means at least once per week until Paul’s back and then more often than that!

For amusemant we’ve added the Babel Fish automatic translation tool to this site. If you want the computer to automatically translate into a number of languages (including French, German, Spanish and Italian) then just click on the corresponding flag on the bottom right hand corner of the page. Give it a try and see what you think.

Babel fish is available for quick, dirty and (overly) literal translation at http://babelfish.altavista.com/