Name: Maria Blanco-Arnejo

INSTITUTION: Willamette University

LANGUAGE: Spanish

STATUS: Full-time, tenure track

TYPE: CourseRelease

TYPE1: StudentAssistant

TITLE: Guided reading of selected poems

DURATION: Spring semester 2000

DESCRIPTION: I plan to select 10 Spanish poems and create a Web-based guided reading exercise for each of them with several parts: 1. Glossary. Vocabulary links to dictionary or explanatory images 2. Grammar. Explanations and exercices about some specific structures. 3. Versification. Explanations on the measure, rime and rhythm of the poem. 4. Semantics. Insights on the meanings of the poem. 5. Style. How the rhetoric figures, the form of the poem, contribute to convey the themes. 6. Audio and visual aids. Video clips, digital photos, songs and readings of the poem, to help visualize its meaning. 7. Links to other poems, related by theme, style, period, etc.

OUTCOME: The result of my project will be 10 lessons on poems from different periods in Latin American and Spanish literature. Each lesson will cover information about the poem in order to understand it better, and also exercises to practice the words, structures, and figures that appear in the poem. The lessons could be used at the Intermediate level, but they will be particularly useful in the class Span 340 Introduction to Spanish literature. In this class, the students learn how to analyze a poem, the basic tools of literary analysis. These lessons will guide them through the reading of different kinds of poems, with specific explanations and exercices for each part of the analysis. The lessons could be used in different ways. They can be assigned as homework, as preparation for an in-class discussion of the poem. Another option is to use each lesson for a class in a multimedia room with a big screen. One or two students could be in charge of each poem, preparing it ahead of time and presenting to the class selected parts of the lesson

TIMELINE: The project will be completed during the Spring semester of the year 2000. With help of WITS and the LLC, I will first learn about the technology I will need to develop the project, such as web design, digitizing images, etc. I expect to test some of the lessons by the end of the semester in my Span 340 class.

AMOUNT: 4,200 dollars

BREAKDOWN: Course release 3,000 dollars. Student help 150 hours (10 hours per week) at 8 dollars per hour 1,200 dollars.