Reading is a complex and difficult skill. The main difficulty beginning readers face is learning which letters represent which sounds—and then getting used to those patterns by reading them, again and again, in different combinations and contexts. It takes practice to learn how to read. Research also shows that the easier reading is, the more l…[Read more]

A Presentation for the Technology Panel at Tsadra’s “Translation & Transmission” Conference, 2017.

How do we use technology skilfully during the translation process? How do we install updates, rather than continue to fall back on outdated legacy systems? What tools can we avail ourselves to? How do they work, and what do they do?

Creating a Spoken Corpus for the Tibetan Language: Utilizing Spoken Language Research to Propagate Literacy & Everyday Tibetan.

This presentation is about how and why to implement a modern pedagogy for Tibetan as a Second Language (TSL).

This paper explores issues of fidelity & transparency in translation of poetry. The importance of literary aspects such as regular linguistic patterning (in meter & prosody), culturally-encoded meaning, idiomatic language, formal equivalence (of form), and the emotional viscerality of poems are discussed as they relate particularly to an…[Read more]

This small study on literacy explores levels of reading comprehension in the Tibetan diaspora. By testing vocabulary and syntax comprehension of 4 different texts across 88 participants, we conclude that, although education levels are not predictors of language skills, two factors do correlate with higher reading levels: 1) being born and raised…[Read more]

The following paper explores classical Tibetan language pedagogy as it’s generally practiced in the West, while suggesting a radical reinterpretation to that approach by providing alternatives based on the consensus of multidisciplinary research from second language education and linguistics, among others. Especial attention is paid to the i…[Read more]

Traditional pedagogy for learning alphabetic principles focuses on introducing the alphabet a letter at a time in a traditional order—the ABCs for English speakers; ཀ་ཁ་ག་ང་། for Tibetan. What educational research has shown, however, is that this form of education can actually be disadvantageous to the beginning reader. Instead, students b…[Read more]

Corpus Linguistics and NLP have many obvious applications for researchers, academics, and
other specialists; what should not be overlooked, however, is their role in improving the mundane,
everyday interactions between people and language, be they a reader of a newspaper; a child with
a storybook; or a student in a classroom. The language…[Read more]