Founded in 1994, the Berkeley Language Center (BLC) is housed in the Division of the Arts and Humanities of the College of Letters and Sciences. The BLC is a vibrant community that engages with faculty, graduate students and undergraduates to advance its central mission: to support the learning and teaching of world languages on the Berkeley campus and beyond. To realize this mission, we:
- Support research in applied linguistics, pedagogy, and second language acquisition and its dissemination through conferences and professional journals, including the L2 Journal, an open-access, fully refereed interdisciplinary journal.
- Provide innovative teaching materials, such as Lumiere, a film clip library used around the world, and opportunities to produce new materials.
- Host professional talks and conferences to engage with new developments, such as the use of machine translation in language education, digital literacies, and translanguaging
- Celebrate the importance of multilingualism and multiculturalism through special-events such as the annual Words in Action: A Multilingual Student Performance
- Contribute to language preservation, including indigenous languages of California by supporting the work of the California Language Archive