For Immediate Release June 29, 2005

For More Information Contact: Diane Brown, 317-274-7711 habrown@iupui.edu

Case Studies May Do Better Than Standardized Tests in Capturing Academic Success of Students Learning English

INDIANAPOLIS - Can standardized exams accurately assess academic progress of Indiana elementary students learning to speak English? A classroom teacher and a bilingual teacher's aide say case studies may do a better job.

Maggie Robillard and Alicia Añino will present a classroom case study of a third-grade Spanish-speaking student's literacy skills during the Second Annual Conference on Intercultural Rhetoric and Written Discourse Analysis next month at IUPUI.

"English Language Learners make significant progress that standardized tests cannot capture," report Robillard and Añino in the abstract of their upcoming presentation entitled "Literacy Case Study and Intercultural Rhetoric as an Alternative Method to Assess Elementary School Second Language Learners."

Linguists from around the world will share research and practical applications for addressing issues involving intercultural communication during the conference July 22-23 at University Library on the IUPUI campus, 755 W. Michigan St.

Organized by the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, the conference will attract scholars and teachers from more than 10 countries to present papers and discuss issues and solutions of intercultural communication.

Most of the conference speakers are language researchers or teach English in schools, businesses, governments, and nonprofits in their countries, which include China, Taiwan, Japan, Macao, Australia, Nigeria, Iran, Egypt, Spain, Italy, Turkey and the United States.

Other conference papers deal with topics such as internet discourse across cultures; Arabic rhetoric and its impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict; e-mail writing in the international workplace; comparison of the writing of American and Korean graduate students; analysis of African American male and female speech patterns; personal communication in annual reports of Spanish and UK companies; stereotyping of Turkish Americans in news reports; and rhetoric of bilingual Hispanic university students in the US.

Plenary speakers include Srikant Sarangi, Cardiff, Wales, a world-renowned scholar on intercultural communication in medical and other professional settings; Ana Moreno, University of Leon, Spain, an expert on differences in academic writing in Spanish and English; and XiaoMing Li, who works on Chinese rhetoric and its effect on the writing of Chinese speakers in English.

ICIC Director Ulla Connor, the Barbara E. and Karl R. Zimmer Chair in Intercultural Communication, will present a lecture titled "Intercultural Rhetoric: Further Defined."

For additional information about the conference and opportunities to interview speakers, call Ulla Connor at (317) 278-2441 or e-mail uconnor@iupui.edu.

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