Global Partners 2003
East Africa Travel Grant Report

Ali Skandor, Ohio Wesleyan University
with Ivan Dihoff, Antioch College

Fax number: n/a

This year's proposal between Antioch and Ohio Wesleyan colleges that produced video footage in the Swahili language received continuing support from Global Partners. This collaborative project sought to continue the video presentation of transformational drill exercises in Kiswahili as a way to encourage students to acquire higher levels of grammatical skill independently. This summer we filmed the exercises with native speakers of Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania.

In these drills students repeat what they hear and see as an exercise to increase their vocabulary and to develop their ability to comprehend grammatical structures. It is expected that most students exposed to the guidance of these drills will quickly develop threshold fluency in Kiswahili.

The work of capturing and digitizing the footage is currently underway at Ohio Wesleyan University‚s multi-media lab. Upon completion, Dr. Dihoff of Antioch College and Ali Skandor of Ohio Wesleyan will review and edit the footage into the final format. It is expected that by the end of December, 2003 the final product will be available on CD-ROM for student usage. Some of this footage will be posted to the Modern Foreign Language Labs at Ohio Wesleyan and Antioch for distribution and could be available to any institution upon request.

For additional information, please contact Matt Horstman at horstman@glca.org or 1-734-761-4833.