MUSIC & PUBLICATIONS

Klila Bracha

“Klila Bracha is a meditation on the lessons in thoughtfulness, love, appreciation, trust and humility I have learned from all those I have met on my journey. I hope you will be touched by these same qualities through my music.”

Klila Bracha is the third of a trilogy of albums that tell the story of Celia’s life and soul in music. Each album represents the music, culture and spirit of the Indonesian, Japanese and Jewish influences on her life. Her first album, Purity, followed her life from Indonesia to Japan, and the beginning of her spiritual journey in pursuit of purity within herself and her music. Her second album, Purity, Honesty and Hope, epitomized these values to which she has always aspired.

Celia’s Biography: Kono Toki O Ikiru (“Seize the Moment!”)

Celia Dunkelman (Published by Soshinsha)

It is never easy to put into words the feelings of the heart, and for someone like me, who is used to expressing herself in music, it is even more difficult. What I feel in my heart is the love, support and respect of those around me. My friends, fans, and most of all my family, have been there for me whenever I needed them, and it is from them that I have drawn my strength.

There are many setbacks on the way to achieving our aspirations — many we never expect, and many we cannot solve by ourselves. Always trust your heart, and never give in to failure. Seize the Moment. You have but one life, value yourself, respect yourself. I have learned that to attempt to achieve one’s goals in life requires an inner strength, but to actually achieve them requires an “outer strength.” For me this has come from those who have loved and supported me more than anyone else could: my father and mother, my husband, and my children Shayna, Asher and Nava.

The Application of  Selected Sociolinguistic Concepts to Second Language Syllabus Design

Jay Dunkelman (Published by the University of Surrey)

This work explores how language learning in general, and syllabus design in particular, can benefit from what interactional sociolinguistics has discovered about how language is used to serve referential meanings, and how contexts determine the social, cultural and expressive meaning of utterances.

Sociolinguistics, with its emphasis on the collection and statistical analysis of data on the social and cultural aspects of language acquisition, has generally played a remote, if complementary, role in TESOL and language learning research. Although speech acts or functions are viewed by sociolinguistics as having social origins, language teachers have long assumed that patterns and rules could be discovered and taught to nonnative speakers. Given the complementary natures of sociolinguistics, which studies how people communicate, and language teaching, which seeks to teach people how to communicate, this would appear to be a reasonable assumption.

Despite its importance, the learner’s lack of familiarity with the social dimension of language is evidenced in the classroom and social occurrence of learners failing to grasp the intended meaning of utterances despite possessing lexical and grammatical competence. The standard remedy for this deficiency has historically been deductive in nature. Learners have been taught how something was done; for example, how to apologize or speak informally, and then practiced sample conversations.Departing from this approach, the Communicative Language Teaching syllabus developed in this dissertation takes an inductive approach to inculcating sociolinguistic concepts. Crucial to this process is the study of “frames,” defined here as a dynamic set of expectations about social relations based on prior experience and background knowledge, which speakers bring to a given situation. The syllabus emphasizes the study and analysis of people and situations from the perspective of framing, which is shown to be a common thread running through several interactional sociolinguistics concepts: schema, power and solidarity, alignment, footing and face. Through the use of videos and texts, the teacher guides learners to an appreciation of the social context of language, thereby developing in them more appropriate expectations, understanding and responses to utterances.