Holy Cross Receives STARTALK Grant for Third Year in a Row
Tuesday, June 03, 2014
STARTALK team 2013
This is the third year in a row that the College has received STARTALK funding for this program.
National Security Language Initiative
STARTALK programs are a component of the National Security Language Initiative, which is aimed at expanding and improving the teaching and learning of "critical languages". These are strategically important world languages that are not widely taught in the United States.
The proposal was authored by Claudia Ross. Ross is a professor of Chinese in the department of modern languages and literatures, and she will serve as the program director.
Develop best practices
The goal of the Holy Cross STARTALK literacy program has been to use research findings to develop ‘best practices,’ effective instructional strategies for teaching students how to read Chinese.
“STARTALK grants are very competitive, and we are thrilled to have received funding three years in a row,” says Ross. “Holy Cross is one of only 40 STARTALK-funded Chinese teacher training programs in the country and the only one in the state of Massachusetts.”
"Literacy acquisition is the most challenging part of learning Chinese," said Ross. "There are three main difficulties. Characters: the unit of Chinese writing, the character, reflects meaning rather than systematic pronunciation, and learners have to know 5000-7000 characters in order to read a newspaper. Word boundaries: most Chinese words consist of two or more characters, but in a Chinese text, characters are evenly spaced on the page so that word boundaries are not apparent. Spoken-written divide: formal written texts use vocabulary and grammatical features that do not occur in contemporary speech. Learners cannot simply transfer over what they know about the spoken language when they read a Chinese text.”
The leadership team also includes Baozhang He, associate professor of Chinese in the department of modern languages and literatures, who will serve as the program coordinator, and Dr. Meng Yeh, associate director of the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice University, who will serve as the instructional lead.
Character literacy development and reading literacy
In 2012, Holy Cross' STARTALK focused on character literacy development and in 2013, reading literacy.
The program will include workshops led by two researchers in the field of Chinese literacy development, Dr. Michael Everson, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and Dr. Helen Shen, associate professor of Chinese at the University of Iowa.
As in 2012 and 2013, participants at this year’s program will be 25 Chinese language teachers representing U.S.-based Chinese programs from kindergarten through college.
To learn more about the program, please visit http://college.holycross.edu/projects/startalk-chinese-literacy/index.html.
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