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).

[Note for PC users: To see all characters and graphics as intended on this webpage, the browser’s setting for "Encoding" may need to be manually set to "Western European (Windows)" rather than "Unicode." In Internet Explorer, check under View/Encoding; in Firefox, either under the "ae" text-encoding symbol in the Menu area or already in the menu bar--usually at the top right of the window--or for newer versions, under the Menu logo (3 horizontal lines, upper right), select More/Text Encoding/Western. To view this homepage as a PDF, please click here.]

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 3^e 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.