Author: Mark Kaiser

Results in BLC Posts

New BLC Personnel

Chris Palmatier, the BLC’s programmer for the past several years and before that, manager of the DCRF facility, has left the BLC for a bright future in independent contracting of his programming skills. Chris has been an amazing asset to the BLC, helping numerous faculty with advice and contributions to their research and educational software.…

Lecture by Barbara Johnstone, September 23, 2011

Identifying with Language by Barbara Johnstone, Professor of English and Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon University. For the last decade or two, identity has been a hot topic throughout linguistics. Sociolinguists use the concept of identity to help explain why particular styles of speech get taken up in particular speech communities, and how and why people shift…

Teaching Japanese Pragmatic Competence Using Film Clips

In all 1st- through 3rd-year Japanese courses at UC Berkeley, students are expected to write several skits over the course of the semester. Each skit is submitted to the instructor for corrections, after which students perform the skit in class. Students appear to enjoy these oral quizzes. While checking 3rd-year Japanese students’ scripts, I have…

Symposium: History and Memory in Foreign Language Study, September 10, 2011

**** Videos now available - please use Safari or Firefox ***** Saturday, Sept.10, 2011 9-5:30 pm 370 Dwinelle INTRODUCTION The MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages (2007) has advocated teaching, together with functional language abilities, ‘critical language awareness’ and ‘historical and political consciousness’. Indeed, the many commemorative events in the cultures we teach as…

On the Same Page: Voices of Berkeley

This coming year’s “On the Same Page” program is all about linguistic diversity and multilingualism. The website, On the Same Page: Voices of Berkeley, is now up and running, and has a great “Welcome” video as well as links to 1) a virtual bookshelf of reading materials; 2) the “Talk Back” experiment, which allows new…

California Language Archive is now live

We are pleased to announce that the Audio Archive of Linguistic Field Recordings and the Survey of California and Other Indigenous Languages have merged their databases and are now accessible through the portal site California Language Archive. The Audio Archive contains 1700+ hours of recordings of stories, songs/chants, and elicitation of linguistic data in 221…

BLC Lecturer Profile: Amelia Barili

Amelia Barili is a Spanish Language and Culture lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, who is inspiring and preparing university students to use what they know to help others, through an innovative pedagogy that integrates the most recent findings of Cognitive Science Neurobiology and Service Learning. Recognizing the potential that UC Berkeley students…

Cuts in funding for international education

As many of you know, the Continuing Resolution passed by Congress contains significant cuts to international education, including a 40% cut in funding for Title VI centers, Fulbright-Hays, and FIPSE. These cuts will impact the quality of international education at UC Berkeley, in particular funding for students to study LCTLs. Please read the letter from…

Which language is this (April-May)?

Last month’s language: Korean. Now see if you can discover this month’s language, without using the Internet! Even though it is the native language of only 40% of the population of this small country of 12 million souls, it is spoken by 94% of them.  One of its most notable characteristics is that it features…

Higher Ceilings on Travel Support

Effective July 1st, the BLC will support lecturer travel to conferences where the lecturer is giving a paper up to $750 for domestic travel, and up to $1000 for international travel, subject to budget restrictions. This compares with a $500 limit on all travel support the past several years. The reality is that even a…

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