Author: Victoria Williams

Teachers of World Languages, including teachers of English Learners and Heritage Languages, are invited to participate in the professional learning programs, Foundations of Effective Language Teaching I, 2, or 3. The program will be offered on five Saturdays: September 27, October 25, December 6, January 31, 2014, and February 28, 2015, from 8:00 am to…

Will digital textbooks replace print textbooks as the standard material for teaching and learning languages? Will instructional design reach the point where computer-based learning systems do away with the need for instructors? Will continued advances in machine translation serve as further de-motivation for learning a language at all? To provide perspective on these questions, this…

Currently, Japanese lecturers create and give 60-minute walk-in placement exams for new students one week before each semester starts. The lecturers grade each test manually, so the results may vary depending on how and by whom the tests are graded and various subjective factors. Therefore, the Japanese Program needs a more efficient and objective method…

From the News Center: Breath of Life

From May 22 to May 24, 2014, I participated in the 7th International Women in French Conference, held in the charming city of Guelph in the Ontario province of Canada. As a newcomer to the conference, I was particularly pleased to discover a welcoming atmosphere among colleagues in French Studies from various parts of the…

My colleague, Vesna Rodic, and I participated in the 7th International Women in French conference held at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Canada, May 21-24, 2014. The overarching conference theme was Women and Memory. Our presentations were in the pedagogy session that Vesna had organized on Approaches to Teaching Women and Memory which comprised…

Listen to a story on the language restoration workshop from KQED’s The California Report: Breath of Life Language Restoration Workshop for California Indian Languages June 1-7, 2014 University of California at Berkeley Hosted by The Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival and The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages This is a one-week workshop…

With the support of the BLC, I had the opportunity to present a paper at the annual American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference, which was held March 24-27 in Portland. I have attended this conference regularly for the past eight years. This conference brings together both American and international researchers with broad and diverse…

On May 25th, I attended and presented a paper at the National Council of Teachers of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL) in Itasca, IL, outside (way outside!) Chicago.  I was able to do so thanks to a travel grant from BLC in the amount of $750. However, even at this amount, this particular conference is…

On March 7-8, 2014, I attended and presented at the National Heritage and Community Languages Conference at UCLA, hosted by the NHLRC (National Heritage Language Resource Center) there. I was able to do so in part through a grant from the BLC, combined with my usual travel support from the UC Berkeley/UCLA combined Center for…