DLI Alumni Association (DLIAA) Quarterly Newsletter XXII Issue 2-09 - April 2009 "In Support of the Defense Language Institute" http://www.dli-alumni.org/

Rosetta Stone

1. Message from the president
2. In memoriam (1 Jan - 31 Mar 09)
3. Reassignments (1 Jan - 31 Mar 09)

4. Retirements (1 Jan - 31 Mar 09)

5. Calendar of events (FY 09-10)

6. DLIFLC Experiment puts 'Leaders In Front Teaching.' - PFC Chesley Bond

7. Walter Scurei Scholarship Fund
8. 2009 will be DLIFLC’s ‘Year of the Faculty’
9. Three-time DLI Graduate publishes two books - By T.H.E. Hill
10. DLIAA President publishes bilingual (Spanish-English) book - Ben De La Selva
11 . DLI civilian retirees can now obtain ID cards to get access to the Presidio.

12. 68th DLIFLC Anniversary Ball - 24 October 2009 - Naval Postgraduate School

13. DLI Memorabilia

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1. Message from the DLIAA president.   

 

    Many of you have heard Socrates' adage “I only know that I know nothing," perhaps suggesting that the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. Although this statement is probably true with respect to any significant life endeavor, many language students think that it does not apply to their field. They also disregard another belief associated with language learning: "If your language proficiency is not getting better, it is getting worse." Therefore, I exhort all of you to ponder these two assertions and rush back to your language studies. As in the past, I look forward to hearing from you about your thoughts, suggestions and stories. You can write to me at DLIAA Newsletters.

Benjamin De La Selva, President.
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2. In Memoriam (01 Jan - 31 Mar 09)

DINORAH FLORES, 31 Jan 09 - Spanish Department faculty member

REJANE MORENO, 2 Feb 09 -Spanish and French Departments faculty member
MARIO IGLESIAS, 5 Feb 09 - Spanish faculty member and Chairperson

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3. Reassignments (01 Jan - 31 Mar 09)

 

    Dr. Clive Roberts to Dean, Asian School II

    Dr. Christine Cambpell to Associate Provost for Language Science and Technology

    Dr. Hiam Kanbar to Dean, Middle Middle East School I

    Dr. Sahie Kang to Division Dean, Continuing Education Directorate

    Dr. Jack Frankie to Dean, Emerging Languages Task Force

    Dr. Mahmood Taba Tabai to Special Advisor to the Associate Provost

    Mr. Montaz Gabriel to Dean, Middle East School II

    Dr. Jurgen Sottung to Assistant to the Associate Provost for Testing and Evaluation

    Mr. Steven Koppany to Assistant to the Associate Provost for Operations

    Mr. Kiril Boyadijeff to Acting Dean, Curriculum Development

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4. Retirements (01 Jan - 31 Mar 09)

DLI Faculty, from left to right	DLI Faculty, not shown above	Garrison Staff, not shown above	Garrison Staff, not shown above
Bahgat Malek, Professor Zenon Obydzinski, Assoc Professor Farid Hanalla, Asst. Professor Tina Shim, Asst. Professor Cecilia Barrera-Green, Asst Professor Samira Nissan, GS-09 Young K. Chang, Assoc. Professor Hiroko Tsuzuki, Assoc Professor Nourredine Ale-Ali, GS-12 Teresa Gryminska, Professor Samuel Kacho, Assoc Professor	Sang O. Chang, Asst. professor Ludmila Cole, Professor Ann S. Crozier, GS-09 Nizar Ersheid, GS-09 Julian Menocal, Asst. Professor Iraj Salem, Asst. Professor Yahia Sirag, Asst. Professor Despina White, Professor	Nino Anacleto Gary Archer Emile Brumfeld Edmund Ferguson William Forrester Edward Fuller Bing Gee-Chuan John Gentle Charles Harper Linda Hoffman-Zinter	Sandra Jurkovich Vincent Kilakalua Virginia Maggay Daniel Makuakane James Moodenbaugh Bent Ramskov Jim Rimando Michael Rosati Collins Stevens Samuel Topps

 

5.  Calendar of events (Fiscal Year 09-10)

- Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Conference - TESOL held its Annual Convention in Mar 09.   For information about 2010's conference go to: http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/seccss.asp?CID=1518&DID=8281

- Command Language Program Seminar 2009 (CLPM)- The CLPM Seminar is being held on 5-7 May 09, at the Monterey Hyatt Regency Resort.

- LANGUAGE DAY- OPEN HOUSE – Friday, 15 May 2009 (Presidio of Monterey) - For more information call Al Macks, at the DLIFLC Public Affairs Office (831) 242-6429
- Annual Program Review (APR) Conference - Scheduled for 28 May 2009 - Presidio of Monterey.

- Memorial Day Parade and Memorialization of Fallen Linguists - Last Friday of May 2009 - Soldier's Field

- DLIFLC Offsite - May or June 2009 (Exact date and venue to be announced later)

- Retiree Appreciation Day - Saturday, 13 Jun 09 at Ord Military Community (Former Fort Ord)

- DLIFLC 68TH ANNIVERSARY BALL - Saturday, 24 October 2009 - Barbara McNitt Ball Room, Hermann Hall, Naval Postgraduate School
- The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Conference - November 2009 - For more information go to http://www.actfl.org/.
- INSTALLATION HOLIDAY CELEBRATION (DLIFLC & POM)- Weckerling Center, December 2009
- California Language Teachers Association (CLTA) Conference - CLTA Conference 2010 - March 10-14, 2010
Town and Country Hotel San Diego  For more information, visit http://www.clta.net/index1.html
- The Digital Stream Conference - Last week of March, 2010 (conference was on sabbatical for 2009), at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB). Most attendees to the conference are DLI faculty and staff. For information about 2010's conference go to: http://wlc.csumb.edu/digitalstream/
- Worldwide Language Competition (WLC) – Competition put on indefinite hiatus.
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6.  DLIFLC experiment puts ‘Leaders in Front Teaching’

 

    Published with permission from Monterey Military News

    By PFC. CHESLEY BOND
    Marine Corps Detachment, Presidio of Monterey

    THE SMALL room was dominated by a table which seated officers and noncommissioned officers. At the front of the room, gesturing toward a smart board, a soldier and an airman gave a presentation in their target language about the online networking site Facebook. The scene seemed to be of a military brief, not a student-led class project.
This is just one instance of a new program at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) under the direction of Air Force Col. William Bare, Assistant Commandant. “Leaders In Front Teaching,” referred to as LIFT, was started in December for all DLIFLC language courses. The program puts language students in the driver’s seat, hoping that through student-led lessons more active learning will take place.
    “The LIFT program is an initiative suggested by the assistant commandant,” said Jielu Zhao, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education. “The purpose is to motivate students by having student leaders conduct learning activities for the class.”
    The students who organize the project have a high degree of control over the implementation. Airman 1st Class William Early and Army Sgt. Nicholas Morrell used their target language to discuss the effects of online networking sites on the global community. They led their class through the presentation three times for understanding, then followed up with a discussion.
    Earley, who has a teaching degree, said the program could work well if it is implemented wisely.
According to Marine Sgt Benjamin Curtis, part of the challenge with LIFT is that it is new and there is no curriculum to base projects on. Essentially, students need to come up with something on their own, he said.
    “I think once the program grows a little and ideas are exchanged we can find a basic idea of what a finished presentation should look like,” said Curtis.
    The program stems from a discussion between Bare and Dr. Donald Fischer, DLIFLC Provost. Bare recalls the two were discussing ways to complement instruction when Bare recalled that at a school he had attended students were given 45 minutes in front of their class on a regular basis. Bare said these exercises helped him “take ownership of his education” and he hopes to bring that to DLIFLC. According to Bare, Fischer immediately took the idea to the schools and in no time the program was set into motion.
    “I’ve been to some of the schools and I am very pleased to see what the schools have done with this,” said Bare.
Bare declines credit for the idea though, saying that the implementation of LIFT was handled by teachers and students in the language schools.
    “It’s everybody’s idea and everybody worked to make this happen,” said Bare. “Let’s just call it a DLI idea.”
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7. Walter Scurei Scholarship Fund

    At the 67th Anniversary Event, the DLIFLC Alumni Association announced the establishment of the Walter Scurei scholarship fund of $1,000 per year for four years, for up to four individuals. The scholarship was created for the spouse or child of a former DLIFLC graduate whose death resulted from any situation caused by direct involvement in any U.S. armed conflict, or in an act of terrorism against the United States.
    Mr. Scurei, though not a DLIFLC graduated, has established a special relationship with the Institute and in 2006 donated three panels of the Berlin Wall to DLIFLC. Today the panels serve as a reminder of the Cold War and the political changes in the early 1990s which altered the balance of power in the world.

    Editor's Note: Please diseminate this information to all who may have friends or family members who qualify for this scholarship.
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8 . 2009 will be DLIFLC’s ‘Year of the Faculty’

    Published with permission from Monterey Military News

    TWO INITIATIVES that are under way at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) will make 2009 “the Year of the Faculty,” Col. Sue Ann Sandusky, DLIFLC Commandant, has announced. One initiative is participating in a thorough review to determine whether the DLIFLC faculty is adequately paid. A second initiative is helping lay plans for a program to prepare the next generation of academic leaders at DLIFLC.
    Sandusky, who describes the 1,700-member DLIFLC faculty as “world class,” said instructors and students are the Institute’s major players. She said the success of DLIFLC instruction -- and of DLIFLC’s Proficiency Enhancement Program, which is designed to produce graduates with higher levels of proficiency than ever before -- requires about equal measures of hard work from those who teach and those who seek to learn.
    “Recognizing that the faculty is so key to the entire enterprise, and particularly to the Proficiency Enhancement Program, I thought that it was very appropriate to highlight the faculty for 2009,” Sandusky said.
Sandusky said she is concerned about the pay DLIFLC members receive because most faculty members are outside the government-wide General Schedule pay system and are in the Faculty Pay System, a facet of DLIFLC’s Faculty Personnel System that was established in 1996.
    A wage-setting board in Washington, D.C., devises pay bands for the Faculty Pay System, indexing them against the salaries of community college instructors, Sandusky said.
    She said the system has not undergone a thorough review since it was established and that the time for one has come, “particularly to look at the structure of our faculty pay bands and how the basic pay index is established.”
To get the process started, Sandusky said, Dr. Donald Fischer, DLIFLC Provost, has done considerable leg work and members of his staff, along Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel and Logistics (DCSPL) staff have made a number of trips to Washington, D.C., to discuss the Faculty Pay System with federal government officials.
    “It’s important, I think, that we undertake locally a thorough review of the Faculty Pay System,” Sandusky said, “and also bring the results of our own internal review to the attention of senior decision-makers who have the authority to adjust the pay band structure and the indexing.”
    Sandusky said she cannot unilaterally make changes in the system.
    “What we’re trying to do in 2009 is identify all of the areas that need to be updated or modified and make the case to the decision-makers that this is the right thing to do in order to adequately compensate our great faculty,” she said.
Sandusky said she also wants to use a collaborative process to identify a “pathway to academic leadership” to serve DLIFLC in the future.
    “We have an active program to grow our faculty, mostly in their teaching capacity,” she said, citing classes and seminars available from DLIFLC’s Faculty and Staff Development Division and elsewhere.
    “But what we don’t really have is a clear career path to grow the next generation of department chairs, assistant deans, deans, assistant provosts, associate provosts -- that kind of academic leadership.”
    Serving in those positions requires different skill sets than being a good teacher, Sandusky said.
    “If faculty members are to step out of classrooms to head schools with multiple departments and several hundred instructors,” she said, “they will need managerial, supervisory and leadership skills.”
    What is taking shape for 2009, Sandusky said, are ongoing formal discussions of what an academic leader at DLIFLC needs to know. Sandusky wants participants to include faculty members from all the schools, members of all DLIFLC directorates and members of DLIFLC’s Academic Senate.
    “And I hope we have good discussions about what leadership means,” she said. “What skills do we need? Are there particular skills we need at DLIFLC that you might not need at a civilian university or at some other large organization in which you’re managing the same amount of money and the same number of people?
    “And then we’ll look at what tools are available to help us do the leadership training that we will have identified. And those tools will include courses that are already offered through the civilian education system and possibly through the new Army Civilian University.”
    Sandusky said the effort is not to assist individuals seeking advanced academic degrees.
“That’s not what this is about,” she said. “This is about identifying training programs for leadership skills -- leadership, management and supervisory skills that people need to run this organization.”
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9. Three-time DLI Graduate publishes two books
    By T.H.E. Hill

    Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary is a spy novel by a three-time DLIWC graduate writing under the pen name of T.H.E. Hill. A reviewer on Amazon.com says: “Captures some of the more amusing aspects of trick work in a field station during the Cold War, as well as life in Germany for ASA personnel. This work would be of particular interest to ASA and DLIWC alums.”
    Hill makes some interesting comments about his time at DLI in an interview with Front Street Reviews. He says, for instance, that he used to go down to the beach after class, feed crab to the sea anemones, and talk to them in Polish (the first time) and later in Russian (the second and third times). You can read the whole interview at http://www.frontstreetreviews.com/Hill%20Interview.html.
    In the time since its release, Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary has garnered some very positive reviews. Writing on his website http://www.SpyWise.net, Britton calls it “a spy novel that breaks all the molds,” adding that “in the tradition of Greene and Ambler, Voices Under Berlin contains many literate qualities that make it a work of special consideration, worthy of an audience much broader than that of espionage enthusiasts or those interested in Cold War history. In fact, one indication of the book’s quality is that it was among the award winners at the July 2008 Hollywood Book Festival, a very rare honor for a spy novel.”
    You can read more reviews of the novel and a sample chapter at www.VoicesUnderBerlin.com.
    The novel is ostensibly set against the backdrop of the Berlin Tunnel (Operation GOLD, covername: PBJOINTLY). The yarn is told from both ends of the tunnel. One end is the story of the Americans who worked the tunnel, and how they fought for a sense of purpose against boredom and the enemy both within and without. This side of the story is told with a pace and a black humor reminiscent of that used by Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H*). The other end of the tunnel is the story of the Russians whose telephone calls the Americans are intercepting. Their end of the tale is told in the unnarrated transcripts of their calls. They are the voices under Berlin.

    The second book, Berlin in Early Cold-War Army Booklets: 1946-1958, was compiled by T.H.E. Hill. It is a reprint of a series of six army booklets on Berlin, covering the period from 1946 to 1958, two years after the Russians shut down the CIA cross-sector tunnel that served as the background for the novel Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary. The booklets represent part of the historical research that went into the novel.
    The booklets are written from a single institutional viewpoint, that of the United States Military Command in Berlin. When read in parallel, the booklets create a sense of living history, because, while they cover the same topics of interest about Berlin, their coverage of these topics changes as the series progresses, and you can see the political relationships of the time change before your eyes. The Germans become America’s friends, and the Russians, once America’s allies, become the new enemy.
    The reprint is indexed and the changes in the text from one edition to the next of the individual booklets are highlighted for ease of comparison.
    Berlin in Early Cold-War Army Booklets: 1946-1958 has likewise found a good reception with the reading public. On Amazon.com, it is listed as the “Frequently Bought Together” companion of Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary.

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10. DLIAA President publishes bilingual book (Spanish-English)
    By Benjamin De La Selva

    "El Hombre de las Mil Caras" - "The Man with a Thousand Faces" - Eight short stories in both Spanish and English.

    Partial excerpt from the book introduction, by Howard Rowland:

Book review by BY X.K. MARUYAMA
The Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin, April 1, 2009
Serving Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, New Monterey, and Carmel
Benjamin De La Selva, 116 pg., $14.99, ISBN 978-0-557-03644-8 (The author of this book is local.)

    The book can be purchased through the author’s website “KING OF THE JUNGLE BOOKS”, at http://www.reydls.com. Upon request, an authographed inscription will be included.

    It can also be purchased from Lulu.com and Amazon.com, by visiting the following links:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/el-hombre-de-las-mil-caras/4453905
http://www.amazon.com/Hombre-las-Caras-Spanish-English/dp/0557036445/ref=pd_rhf_shvl_title
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11. DLI civilian retirees can now obtain ID cards to get access to the Presidio.

    Civilian retirees are now being issued ID cards that allow them access to Presidio facilities. Those interested must go to the ID card section in Taylor Hall and present an SF Form 50, as a proof of retirement, and two forms of ID (e.g., driver's license and any government issued ID card). The SF Form 50 can be obtained from the Civilian Personnel Advisory Center, CPAC. For those who retired more than 5 years ago, CPAC will advise them to write to the Office of Personnel Management, OPM. Additionally, ID card holders will be able to obtain decals for their vehicles.
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12. 68th DLIFLC Anniversary Ball

    Preparations will start very soon for the 68th DLIFLC Anniversary Ball, scheduled to take place at the Naval Postgraduate School on Saturday, 24 October 2009. Details will be announced by email to the DLIAA membership.
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13. DLI Memorabilia