Welcome!

Distance learning will be critical for teaching less-commonly taught languages and preserving the nearly 3,000 world languages that are projected to become extinct in my lifetime.

When I was 12 years old I learned French phrases from a Berlitz audiocassette course. That independent learning experience fueled my lifelong passion to communicate with people from cultures different from my own.

Please have a look around to find out more about me, view my Education Technology projects, browse my Curriculum Vitae, and obtain my contact information. Thanks for stopping by! -Sunny

My First Classroom Wiki

In Spring 2009 I heard Karl Richter, an EDTEC alumnus, present a Language Acquisition Resource Center Brown Bag seminar on the basics of educational wikis. A wiki is a website that is easy to edit by a wide audience of users. Wikipedia is probably the best known example of such a communal kmowledge site. Within two weeks I applied Karl's lunchtime talk into a classroom wiki at Mesa College.

Through my Italian 201 wiki, the college students and the professor shared language, music, travel and gastronomic experiences, and cultivated a passion for all things Italian. Students posted Italian music videos voluntarily and every one practiced his or her Italian outside of the classroom. The students collaboratively wrote and edited dialogues for comedic skits (in-class oral presentations) at the end of the semester.

 

Writing Sample

 

The process by which adults learn and retain a language other than their native tongue greatly intrigues me. The following is a literature review on Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning (pdf format) that I wrote for Linguistics 550, Teaching English as a Second Language.