Persuaded by George's plea at the recent Society of Italian Studies
conference in Glasgow, addressed to the 80 per cent of us on the list
who have not yet introduced themselves, here is a brief biography
and some details of our University:
Name: Anna Proudfoot
Age: best left unspecified
Nationality: Scottish (with background in Italy)
Post: Head of Italian (and Senior Lecturer) at Oxford Brookes
University, the 'second' University of Oxford (the first is down the
hill) where Italian is part of the Languages for Business degree
course.
We teach Italian language courses, Introduction to contemporary
Italy, Italian business language and courses on aspects of business
in Italy. We are moving towards a 'European Studies' dimension and
some of our courses are shared with other languages (e.g. European
business environment). Our students do two work placements in Italy
as part of their course. (This gives me an excuse to visit them.)
The numbers of students taking Italian at school in the UK is small
and from 96-97 we admitted students ab initio, who are taught
separately for the first year, as in most other UK universities.
Given the funding and staffing situation of the 'new Universities' we
are a relatively late entrant in the research stakes. Hence our
'2' rating, as given in George Ferzoco's communication of Jan 97
(we DID score highly in the TQA however).
My own publications so far have been in the area of applied language
teaching - two Italian grammars, with similar names, ma adesso
basta! I am now working on the language of the media, with a
fascination for the language of advertising, and the coded language
used in the press. If anyone else is working on it, I'd love to hear
from them.
In my spare time (?) I run the language training unit which provides
language training, translation, interpreting, voiceovers in
several different languages, both European and non-. Ours are the
voices of the shepherds at Stonehenge, on your guided tour cassettes,
in French, German and Japanese! More prosaically, we have just run
an intensive Italian weekend for 60 people.
I hope this is enough to keep George quiet and to encourage fellow
members to tell us something about themselves!
Anna Proudfoot
Head of Italian
School of Languages
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford (UK)
Tel: +44 1865 483717/483720
Fax: +44 1865 483791
Email: [log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|