Dr. Joel Goldfield
Dr. Joel
Goldfield is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures (in
French), Head of the French section, and Director of the Assistant Teacher/Oral
Practice Session (AT/OPS) Program. He has also served as Chair of the
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (DMLL: 2021, 2020, and 2004-7)
and as the founding director of the Charles E. Culpeper Language Resource
Center (1994-2008). He supervises approximately 30 French majors and minors and
is the Advisor to the French
Club at Fairfield University.
CLASSES TAUGHT:
Prof. Goldfield teaches undergraduate courses in French language,
culture, and civilization, French literature, business and culture, approaches
to translation, and on foreign language methodology. His new undergraduate
course taught in Spring 2017 and 2018 is one of the Department’s
Senior Capstones: Foreign Language Teaching, Learning and Technology
(FREN/GRMN/ITLN 4999). He has also taught an experimental course on Foreign
Language Teaching and Technology for undergraduate and graduate school credit.
Additionally, Dr. Goldfield has co-created and co-taught an Honors Program
course, "The Future of the Book," dealing with the impact of
technology and new knowledge on Western civilization.
Research
and Publications
Joel
Goldfield has published hypertextual short stories from 19th-century French
literature for Transparent Language and co-authored French textbook materials for University Press of New
England and Heinle & Heinle
Publishers. He has also authored numerous articles and reviews on
computer-assisted literary research, foreign language methodology,
computer-assisted language learning and faculty development. Dr. Goldfield
co-authored a chapter with Dr. Kurt Schlichting on a role for geographical
information systems (GIS) in language learning ("Foreign Language,
Sociology and GIS: Exploring French Society and Culture," in Understanding
Place: GIS and Mapping across the Curriculum, Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2007).
Additional information on their research is available on the GIS project webpage and at http://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/sociologyandanthropology-books/30/
or http://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/sociologyandanthropology-books/index.3.html.
Prof. Goldfield`s presentations on the role and prospective roles of GIS in
language learning include those at Amherst College, U. of
Illinois/Urbana-Champaign (NCSA), Longwood University, Ramapo College of NJ,
St. Lawrence University, Southern Connecticut State, SUNY/New Paltz, VMI,
Wesleyan (CT), and Yale. For more information on his research, please see the citations and acknowledgments.
Professor
Goldfield is a co-author with the late professors John Rassias
and Jacqueline de la Chapelle Skubly of the workbook, lab manual and audioscript
materials (2008) for the 4th edition of Le Français:
départ-arrivée and is a contributor to the textbook, published in 2007
by the University Press of New England. A recent article,
"Ten Years of Speaking to Learn," summarizes ten years of
research on the implementation of the Rassias
Method/Dartmouth Intensive Language Model at Fairfield University. Elsewhere,
Dr. Goldfield’s chapter,
"Technology Trends in Faculty Development, Preprofessional Training and
the Support of Language and Literature Departments," appears in Chairing
the Foreign Language and Literature Department, Part 2, a special issue of
the ADFL Bulletin (Modern Language Association, Spring 2001). For
information on recent CALL research related to grants, please see below under
"Grants." Please click on the next link to see information on
the International Studies/Language Technology Initiative (ISLT).
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Literary
Computing
Work on
stylometry or stylometrics, literary criticism and
corpus stylistics has been the focus of Dr. Goldfield’s long-term research
projects since the late 1980’s. His most recent contribution in
this field is, "Understanding Tocqueville
across Time and Languages through the HathiTrust
Collection," presented at the annual
convention of the American Comparative Literature Assoc., at Harvard University
(2016). Additional papers in this area of the digital humanities, such as those
delivered at the Sorbonne in June 2006 and the University of Oulu, Finland, in
June 2008, are entitled, "French-English Literary Translation Aided by
Frequency Comparisons from ARTFL and Other Corpora" and "Homebodies
and Gad-Abouts: A Chronological Stylistic Study of 19th-Century French and
English Novelists" (co-authored with Dr. David Hoover, English, NYU) and
were part of the annual conference of the Association for Computers and the
Humanities (ACH) and Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).
Representative early work in literary computing appears in "Computational Thematics, a Selective Database and Literary Criticism: Gobineau, Tic Words, and Riffaterre
Revisited," Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and
Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric, ed. Rosanne G. Potter, U. Penn., 1989,
pp. 97-122.
Editorial
Work
A former
Assistant Editor of Computers and the Humanities and Director on the
Board of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Dr.
Goldfield is currently Managing Editor of The Ram's Horn, a
peer-reviewed journal on experiential language learning published by The Rassias
Center for World Languages and Cultures (formerly The Rassias
Foundation) at Dartmouth College. The journal welcomes manuscripts
in MLA style and is planning its next issue for 2022-23. He is currently a
manuscript reviewer for FLAnnals, the journal of the
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).
Research
Grants
Dr.
Goldfield’s recent projects in literary computing/digital humanities include
research into the style of Alexis de Tocqueville and into the evolution of
vocabulary and style in the age of the internet. He served as an Associate Investigator in the
U.S. Dept. of Education Grant for 2007-2011, "Critical
Languages Eurasia Initiative," and was also one of three investigators
in a three-year grant project (1999-2002), the International
Studies/Language Technology Initiative. The latter project examined new
possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration in using foreign languages
across the curriculum (FLAC), especially in the social sciences. Funded by The
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the former Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, and the
Archbold Charitable Trust, the ISLT Initiative involved approximately
twenty-eight faculty from fourteen different disciplines in applications of
Virtual Language Lab technologies and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
The
Assistant Teacher/Oral Practice Session (AT/OPS) Program
Dr.
Goldfield is the Director of the Assistant Teacher/Oral Practice Session (AT/OPS)
Program, adapted by the DMLL in 1998 from the Dartmouth Intensive Language
Model. These non-credit "labs" are small sections taught by students
trained and supervised by faculty. The OPS function as guided oral homework for
students in Core (general education) courses for as many as eight modern
languages currently taught at the University. These sessions help students
bridge the proficiency gap between what they can read/write and what they can
communicate orally. Results of testing by a third party (ACTFL) regarding the
effects of the Rassias Method on raising the
proficiency level of beginners in a variety of languages are available in Breakthrough:
Essays and Vignettes in Honor of John A. Rassias,
ed. Mel B. Yoken (New York: Peter Lang) 2007. Also
see the article link to "Ten Years of Speaking to Learn" above, under
Research and Publications.
Program
Reviews, Workshops, Faculty Development and Institutional Projects
Much of Dr.
Goldfield’s
teaching and research time at Fairfield or as a leader of workshops at other
educational institutions is devoted to foreign language program reviews,
faculty development on foreign language standards, second language acquisition,
methodology and the integration of technology into teaching styles and the
curriculum. He chaired the first DMLL self-study (program review).
Internationally, he has been a consultant and presenter on language proficiency
testing, language methodology and the Rassias Method
for Educando (formerly Worldfund)
under the aegis of the Inter-American Partnership for Education (IAPE) in conjunction with Dartmouth
College and the Mexican Ministry of Education. Results of a randomized study
(2014) of Mexican teachers of English by the Inter-American Development Bank
(IDB), one of few randomized language studies ever successfully concluded,
revealed that students of the teachers trained in the Rassias
Method (RM) advanced in their English curriculum by 10 weeks in a
7.5-month period over the students of non-IAPE-trained English teachers. See
the IAPE link above for more information. Since 2007, IAPE’s teacher-training
workshops have impacted over two thousand Mexican teachers and two million
Mexican students.
Professor Goldfield has also conducted several internally grant-funded projects
for faculty integration of oral-proficiency testing and computer-assisted
language learning (CALL) into language and literature curricula. In 1995-96, he
researched and co-authored Fairfield University’s first study of
its information resources for Standard 7 of the reaccreditation visit by the
former New England Association of Schools & Colleges (NEASC). He has held New Hampshire teacher
certification in French, German and Music.
Language
Immersion Programs
Dr.
Goldfield has served as the academic director of Fairfield University’s credit program
for the summer, in-person Accelerated Language Programs (ALPs) in partnership
with the Rassias
Center for World Languages and Cultures at Dartmouth College.
Professor
Goldfield served as Academic Director of the former University Rassias Institute for Language and Cultural Studies, which
has offered weekend and non-weekend immersion programs ("WIPs") in
the Fairfield area in French, Italian and Spanish in cooperation with The Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures. Other WIPs
languages may be offered by request: Brazilian Portuguese, German, Hebrew,
Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian.
The
Culpeper Language Resource Center
As founding director of the LARC, Dr.
Goldfield was responsible for teaching and supervising a staff of approximately
a dozen undergraduate and graduate students and occasionally, adjunct faculty
members who undertook special curricular projects and assisted in managing the
center. Many "alumni" of the LARC have gone on to careers ranging
from foreign language teaching to academic computing support to international
business. The LARC also helps faculty from other departments working on
intercultural or foreign language projects, such as the U.S. Dept. of Education
grant ("Critical Languages Eurasia Initiative" for Mandarin Chinese
and Russian, link above) and a federal FIPSE grant for Economics and Brazilian
Portuguese http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jgoldfield/Brazilwww-17.pdf.
Short biographical
statement about Dr. Joel Goldfield
To the
Modern Languages and Literatures homepage
and Catalog
information
To the Fairfield University homepage
E-mail: jgoldfield@fairfield.edu
Tel.: 203-254-4000, ext. 2304
Academic degrees:
Ph.D. 1986 (Doctorat de 3e cycle): Littérature et civilisation
françaises, option moderne et contemporaine. Université Paul Valéry,
Montpellier III, France. Ancien boursier du Gouvernement français.
M.A.
Literary Studies: Comparative Literature. Brandeis University.
A.B.
Comparative Literature. Dartmouth College.