Results from all projects undertaken by the NFLRC will be disseminated to the widest audience possible. The primary vehicles for dissemination are the NFLRC publications division and NFLRC-hosted conferences, symposia, workshops, and annual summer institutes.
Conferences and Workshops Throughout the academic year, NFLRC and LLC offer a series of professional development workshops, a minimum of 15 every year. In addition, recognizing that Hawai‘i is well situated as a venue for events focused on languages of the Asia-Pacific region, NFLRC frequently hosts and organizes international conferences that draw participants from across the U.S. and beyond. During the period 2010-14, NFLRC expects to organize, sponsor (or co-sponsor), or host the following major conferences:
- Spring 2011 the 2nd International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC-2).
- Spring 2012 NFLRC will co-sponsor (with National Resource Center East Asia [NRCEA]) and host the Technology & Chinese Language Teaching (TCLT 7) Conference.
- Spring 2013 NFLRC will co-sponsor (with NRCEA, CSEAS, and CPIS) the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC-3). NFLRC also expects to be local host for the national CALICO conference (subject to final confirmation from CALICO.
NFLRC Publications Addressing the LRC authorizing language that program activities “must include effective dissemination efforts, whenever appropriate,” NFLRC supports a vigorous publications program. To the best of our knowledge, we are the only LRC that has a full-time publications manager and publishes a full range of academic products, including scholarly books and academic journals in addition to language teaching materials.
Research results are disseminated through three monograph series. NFLRC Monographs (Richard Schmidt, Series Editor) publishes both single authored and edited collections of research on NFLRC priority themes. The majority of these books (35 published to date) report results from NFLRC projects (example: J. Norris et al., Toward useful program evaluation in college foreign language education, 2009), but some are submitted to us by FL educators or organizations for consideration (example: Everson & Shen, Research among learners of Chinese as a foreign language, 2009, published by NFLRC on behalf of the Chinese Language Teachers Association). The Pragmatics & Language Learning series (Gabriele Kasper, Series Editor) publishes selected papers from the biannual international Pragmatics & Language Learning Conference, and the Pragmatics & Interaction series (Gabriele Kasper, Series Editor) publishes research on topics in pragmatics and discourse as social interaction from a wide variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, focusing especially on Asian and Pacific languages.
NFLRC also publishes language teaching materials in a wide variety of formats, ranging from small-scale manuals produced in-house (for materials with a small or highly specialized potential audience) to high-quality textbooks with accompanying CDs or DVDs. Increasingly, the NFLRC emphasizes electronic publication, and almost all of our language teaching materials are now available as free downloads via the NFLRC website. In addition, we intend to inaugurate an NFLRC Asian-Pacific language channel on YouTube.
Electronic Journals The NFLRC will continue its sponsorship of its three refereed online journals. Language Learning & Technology (LLT) was launched by NFLRC in 1997 as a collaborative project with the Michigan State LRC (CLEAR), with UH assuming responsibility for editorial control and content and CLEAR for production and maintenance of its Web server. LLT has become one of the most respected journals in foreign language education (it’s currently ranked #14 among the Top 20 journals in the field of education, according to ScienceWatch.com) and the preferred venue for publication by authors specializing in the applications of technology in language learning and teaching. Reading in a Foreign Language (RFL) was founded in 1983 at the University of Aston, England, as a print journal and transferred to Hawai‘i in 2002 as an online refereed journal. RFL has since established itself as an excellent source for the latest developments in the field, including improving standards for FL reading. The newest NFLRC journal, Language Documentation & Conservation, initiated in 2007, deals with such topics as the goals of documentary linguistics, assessing ethnolinguistic vitality, problems of data collection, orthography design, reference grammar design, lexicography, literacy, archiving, and ethical issues.