News
Seeking reviewers!
Instructors and students of Kazak
are invited to review the Language Rights lesson developed for the project. Contact CAILS coordinator Wendy Johnson for more information.
Presentation at Association of Central Eurasian Studies Conference (ACES). Graduate teaching assistant David Dettmann presented the CAILS project at the 15th Annual ACES conference in Bloomington, Indiana on March 22, 2008. Thank you, David!
Presentation on CAILS at American Association of Teachers of Turkish. CAILS graduate teaching assistant David Dettmann made a presentation on the CAILS project at the Graduate Student Pre-Conference in Turkish and Turkic Studies as part of the Central Eurasian Studies Society Meeting in Seattle on October 19th. Congratulations, David!
New videotaped interviews from Uzbekistan. CAILS Associate Director Talant Mawkanuli conducted 20 videotaped interviews in the Summer 2007. Excerpts from the itnerviews will be incorporated into CAILS lessons. more »
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CAILS (Central Asian Interactive Listening Series) is the first phase of an initiative led by Professor Uli Schamiloglu, University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, to expand the U.S. national capacity in critical Turkic languages of Central Asia. The project aims to provide cross-language training for students of languages in this region of growing global geopolitical importance and strategic significance for the United States.
CAILS is housed in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute. It is supported in 2006-09 through a generous grant from the U.S. Department of Education International Research and Studies Program.
The goal of the CAILS project is to develop and disseminate a series twenty online lessons designed to enable students with an intermediate level of proficiency in a Central Asian Turkic language to achieve advanced-level listening comprehension in Kazak or Uzbek. The lessons will be freely available online for educational use by individuals and institutions around the world.
The CAILS lessons are content-based, focusing on topics related to Uzbek and Kazak history, politics, religion, culture, education, economics, language, and social issues. The lessons are designed around excerpts from videotaped interviews conducted by CAILS Associate Director Talant Mawkanuli in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the U.S. with prominent scholars, government officials, politicians, students, and leaders business.
The CAILS project builds on the success of similar projects in advanced-level listening comprehension at the UW-Madison led by Benjamin Rifkin, RAILS: Russian Interactive Listening Series, and the T4 Foreign Languages Project; and Magdalena Hauner, Utamaduni Online: An Advanced Level Course in Swahili Language and Culture, managed by Language Institute Associate Director Dianna Murphy. The CAILS project uses the Multimedia LessonBuilder and Annotator, multilingual multimedia authoring tools developed for the T4 Languages Project.
