University of California Office of the President

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005
Robert Blake, director, UC Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching
530-754-7153 / fax 530-754-7152
rjblake@ucdavis.edu

UC LANGUAGE CONSORTIUM AWARDED MAJOR FEDERAL GRANT

Davis, CA -- The University of California Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching has been awarded a prestigious $274,000 grant from the International Research and Studies Program of the U.S. Department of Education. Over a period of three-years, the consortium will produce and distribute a year-long distance-taught course in Punjabi, a language common to both India and Pakistan and the home language of 1.5 million U.S. citizens.

Robert J. Blake, professor of Spanish at UC Davis and consortium director, and Gurinder Singh Mann, Kapani Professor of Sikh Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, are the principal investigators of the project. Blake, a national expert in distance learning technology, is currently the principal investigator of another major grant from the Department of Education that is producing a distance-taught course in Arabic. Singh Mann is the leading U.S. and international expert in Punjabi instruction.

The grant will support the production of state-of-the-art instructional materials in the Gurmukhi script of the eastern Punjab for use in both face-to-face and distance learning environments. The consortium has received an additional $25,000 grant from the South Asian Language Resource Center to produce the materials simultaneously in the Shahmukhi script of the western Punjab.

The consortium is a UC systemwide entity, established in 2000 by the UC Office of the President to maximize the university's resources in foreign languages. Although there is a significant population of Punjabi heritage students across the UC system, Punjabi is regularly taught only on the Santa Barbara and Berkeley campuses. This consortium project will expand access to Punjabi via the Internet by the conclusion of year three.

For more information about the Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching, please visit: http://uccllt.ucdavis.edu

# # #