Fulbright FLTA Newsletter

Enhancing the Fulbright FLTA Experience: The 2006-2007 Fulbright FLTA Workshops

With a record number of Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants (FLTAs) this academic year, FLTAs were separated into two workshops: the first at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC from Wednesday, December 13 to Sunday, December 17, 2006 and the second at the Sheraton Hotel in San Diego, California from Wednesday, January 31 to Sunday, February 4, 2007.

Both workshops shared the goal of providing Fulbright FLTAs with effective new teaching techniques, methodologies and opportunities for networking with fellow FLTAs, as well as the chance to reflect upon their own experiences here in the United States. Guest speakers with backgrounds in foreign language education shared innovative teaching techniques, conflict resolution styles and student assessment plans.

Fulbright FLTAs attending the 2007 San Diego Workshop

Tom Farrell, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Academic Programs for the U.S. Department of State, attended both workshops. His presence reminded Fulbright FLTAs of just how important they are as foreign language teachers and what they contribute as cultural ambassadors. Over 40 staff members from the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs attended the luncheon at the Washington Workshop providing FLTAs with a great opportunity to speak of their experiences with the Fulbright Program's sponsors.

FLTAs on a tour of Washington, DC

Washington, DC proved to be a very popular location once again for this year’s FLTAs. The tour of the monuments, always appreciated, was enjoyed in unusually warm weather.

For those FLTAs disappointed at not having the opportunity to visit Washington, DC, The Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina proved to be a great location and respite from a difficult winter in many areas of the United States. Fulbright FLTAs enjoyed a bus tour of San Diego with stops at locations such as Balboa Park and Coronado Island.

As FLTA alumni know, the best part of the workshop is the final event. In Washington, DC, the closing celebration was held at the grand Carnegie Institution with a buffet dinner, a fabulous FLTA talent show and a surprise guest appearance by former presidential candidate and citizen advocate, Ralph Nader. San Diego’s final event was a beautiful dinner cruise on the harbor where participants enjoyed a buffet dinner, a talent show and dancing. According to all the positive feedback received by Fulbright FLTAs in attendance, these events demonstrate the success of the workshop and the tradition of global friendship fostered by the Fulbright FLTA Program.

If you would like to share photos from either the Washington, DC or San Diego workshop, please click here. We welcome you to check out information about the guest speakers and FLTA PowerPoint presentations from the workshops; please click here for more information.

Lan Guo and Nazgul Abdukarimova Named Fulbright Fellowship Recipients at Mount Union College

FLTAs Lan Guo of China and Nazgul Abdukarimova of Kyrgyzstan

Lan Guo continues last year’s successful enrollment in elementary Chinese courses, with a one year grant from the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program to continue Chinese language classes for Mount Union students and is joined by Nazgul Abdukarimova of Krgyzstan, who will begin the College’s initial offering of the Russian language.

“It is a pleasure to come to Mount Union and have the opportunity to teach Chinese to the students,” said Lan Guo. “This will allow me to experience the communication between two cultures which I believe is very important.”

The program, which was organized in part for Lan Guo and Nazgul Abdukarimova through the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy in China and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, gives opportunities to young teachers or graduate students to participate in a direct exchange program, teaching languages such as Chinese and Russian at U.S. universities and colleges. The Fulbright Program not only provides positive results to the host institution but also to the educator.

“I am very happy to be chosen as a Fulbright Fellow,” said Abdukarimova.  At her university in Kyrgyzstan, Abdukarimova helped initiate a government program of academic integrity in which she served as a project leader for two years, studying communication among institutions including American high schools, universities and colleges. The participants, who were part of the Department of State sponsored International Visitors Leadership Program traveled to New York, NY; Washington, DC and San Diego, CA among other American cities last year.

Guo received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Education at Hainan Normal University in Haikou Hainan, China. She received a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, China.

Abdukarimova received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from Jalalabat State University in Jalalabat, Kyrgyzstan.

“Having both Chinese and Russian courses offered at Mount Union makes us a more important and distinctive College to those to which we compare,” said Dr. Frank Triplett, Professor of Foreign Languages and Director of International Programs, as well as the Coordinator of the Fulbright Initiative at Mount Union. “For a small liberal arts college to offer courses in critical languages such as Chinese and Russian, as well as four international language majors including Japanese, Spanish, French and German, we hope prospective students can realize the political significance and importance languages have in world affairs.”

Perspectives from a Libyan Fulbright FLTA

As a language teacher in my own country of Libya, I applied for the Fulbright Program knowing that it was somehow language related but was otherwise a little hazy on the details.

Having been accepted, my first step was to attend the Department of State-sponsored, IIE-administered Cairo conference in July 2006 where I had a chance to meet with IIE staff and other FLTAs (Foreign Language Teaching Assistants) from Africa and the Arab World. It was a really great opportunity for me to remove the haze, clarify my ideas, and have some questions answered.

Libyan Fulbright FLTA Milood S. Al-Omrani

By the time I left Egypt, I knew that I was embarking on the mission of my lifetime; I was going to teach Arabic, my mother tongue, through the context of culture and show culture through the means of language. I was so excited! I threw myself into activities related to preparing for my program, chief of which was the acquisition of all the materials I would need to promote my culture and achieve the program goals. I made tapes of street Arabic, collected snippets from the press, took hundreds of pictures of everyday life -- anything that might interest and stimulate my future students. With my mother's advice, I bought dozens of small, souvenir-type gifts and clothing items from my home country.

The trip to Cairo in July had been my first outside Libya. In August, I flew across Europe to the New World and on over the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii. Unfortunately, my luggage did not fly with me. Not just my clothes, but my entire collection of teaching materials and reference books vanished. I arrived with no more than the jeans and the tee-shirt I stood in.

I can’t deny that the loss of my luggage didn’t affect me negatively at first, but the enduring support and patience that I was given by my supervisors, Irene Gordon and Dr. Carlos Juarez, and IIE staff gave me a tremendous push forward; they made me feel so much at home here, so far round the world.

From the first moment, the warmth, care, and respect I was given made me realize how great a program this was and how kind, broad-minded, and thoughtful my supervisors were, truly reflecting the human and friendly atmosphere of Hawaii Pacific University as well as the genuine spirit of 'Aloha' of the Hawaiian people.

With all that support, I remembered that I was there on a mission and that there was a job to be done and that I couldn’t let all the people who had supported me down. Nor could I arrive empty handed in front of my students. I had to record my own materials with the help of some native Arabic language speakers in Hawaii to make it sound authentic in class. With the support of my supervisors, IIE, the American Embassy in Libya as well as my family, I managed to receive a parcel full of cultural items and teaching materials from home. Even before starting to teach Arabic, I was determined to set my students on the path of what I call 'enjoyable learning.' I had to deal with stereotypes such as the perceived difficulty of Arabic as a language and to explain to my students that learning it would depend on the time and effort and imagination they were prepared to put in. I realized that this, in turn, would depend very much on the quality of my lessons and that I had somehow to inspire and enthuse, as well as instruct.

I had to work hard and to try to facilitate language learning through role playing, listening, songs, food, and acting. I was keen to present the language as much as possible within its cultural milieu. My philosophy as a teacher is that listening is one of the most important parts of a language lesson, and since here in Hawaii the teacher is the only source of naturally spoken Arabic (as opposed to scripted sound materials), I was soon speaking, miming, and acting out as much as I could in class, quickly discovering how much one can do by using the power of charades.

I usually start my lesson with a warm-up in the form of a listening activity or a speaking one. I truly was amazed how much facilitating language through human communication is possible. My students are really doing well with learning Arabic because I, along with their enthusiasm, have managed to break the barrier of the difficulty of Arabic. I am happy that I have helped them to learn my language and become interested to know more about my culture. Nothing equals the immediate contact with people in an everyday life context such as a classroom. Now my students have gotten rid of the stereotyped picture of someone from the Muslim World or North Africa.

My experience as a student was not far from that; I took two classes and I had a real opportunity to see the whole world in one small classroom. The traditional American citizen is not really more different than what an ordinary human being is in any part of the world except the fact that they are isolated. But once you get in touch with them, they are totally different than what you might have picked from any artificial source. I had a chance to meet Americans, communicate and share my perspective with them about what’s happening around the world. I also had a chance to make friends from other parts of the world -- through the universal language called communication. I was also amazed at the flexibility that the American educational system has even compared to some European countries. Another big surprise for me has been the cosmopolitan lifestyle here at Hawaii Pacific University. I have made friends with Americans from all over the United States and people from all over the world: Norway, Sweden, Germany, Georgia, Japan, New Zealand, Fiji, Iran and Haiti.

I live with roommates from Ohio and Minnesota, and they have really given me the human dimension of their culture and country. One of the many things that touched my heart was that my roommate, Kyle, nursed me when I was sick without even asking him to do it. I got a bad fever and couldn’t go out to get medication. He gave me the medication and checked on me, which has really shown me that universal brotherhood really exists. Americans have really shown me that they are different than the distorted image that Hollywood has made of them and exported to the rest of the world. I got invited to Thanksgiving by an American family in Hawaii and also had friends in New York who invited me to Christmas celebrations while I was on a trip to the East Coast.

On that trip I visited four states: Washington DC, New York, Michigan, and Illinois. When I went to DC, I felt a sense of history, how this country was made; that was really awe-inspiring. When I went to New York, I visited many places: I went to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and I felt how early immigrants worked hard in order to be citizens of this country. They were emerging of photos and showing me their luggage, what they did and had been through before they left their countries. I didn’t stop there, but I followed their ghosts to the Empire State Building and Brooklyn Bridge and saw how they worked hard to build this overwhelming city and make it the face of America. I also had a chance to visit Ground Zero and share my empathy with the families and the people who lost loved ones.

My experiences at Thanksgiving and Christmas brought home how important a program like Fulbright is. For over the past months, I have really come to understand that it doesn't matter what religion you believe in or what language you speak as long as the content of your character reflects the true, good side of your humanity. I realized that getting along with people on a day-to-day basis is really enough to show us the divine in all of us. All of us make mistakes and are full of flaws, but my Fulbright experience has taught me that there’s black and white and a hundred or more shades of gray. I have learned that we have good, bad and different things, that it’s necessary to respect our differences and being different is not a sin.

I wish I could be a Fulbrighter forever but unfortunately, that’s not possible. When I think about my students, the faculty I’m working with, my friends and classmates and all the people who have become part of my everyday life, I feel a strong desire to stay here and not leave. However, I thought it over and I found out that the program was brilliantly devised; we will all realize how different we have become when we go home. We will also realize how much we have changed those who had preconceived notions about us. By going back home, we have a chance to see ourselves in a different context. We will share our experiences with our friends, colleagues and inspire them to promote the noble ideas that we will have learned from our Fulbright experiences. Otherwise, the whole experience will not be fully meaningful.

Many will think that this is just a small step and it’s not worth of looking at. But I say my step and others’ steps are really worth looking at if they are in the right direction. We have walked miles and miles in the wrong direction, so why not try take one, two, and three steps in the right direction to make our lives and futures full and bright (Fulbright) with hope?