Author: Victoria Williams

With the increased interest in studying Arabic as a foreign language in universities around the world, the field of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) attempts to respond to the needs of students and programs by creating Arabic language instructional materials and pioneering much needed research in the field. Because of the generous grant…

A few weeks ago, I attended my first-ever African Language Teachers Association (ALTA) conference in Chicago. In my past profession as a journalist, I had attended numerous conferences, but mostly as a speaker, trainer, or chair of a panel. But I went to the ALTA conference mostly as a student, which made it one of…

This past December, I participated in The 2012 International Conference of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language Conference. In this conference, there were several topics covered. The ones that stood out exceptionally were: Teaching Methodology, Language Analysis, Research, and Material and Grammatical Analysis and Presentation. I found these topics to be very helpful to my…

I attended the AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) Dallas 2013 in Dallas, Texas, March, 2013. I presented my research entitled “L2 accent transfer in L3 production: Evidence from L3 Korean”. This is my first participation in AAAL, which I’ve heard a lot from the Applied Linguistics people and yes, it was a valuable opportunity…

This year the AAS (Association for Asian Studies) Annual Conference was held in San Diego, March 21-24. I myself took part in a roundtable titled “New Approaches to Teaching Advanced Level Vietnamese Language to Heritage and Non-Heritage Students.” A short abstract of our discussion can be found online, at http://www.asian-studies.org/conference, and conveniently included below for…

The Language of Neoliberalism; Metaphors and Ideology by Marnie Holborow, Dublin City University. The seminar discusses the impact of neoliberal ideology on language and language use. It will describe the symbolic and semantic mechanisms through which the ideology is articulated, focusing specifically on metaphorical processes surrounding the notion of the market and markets as they…

Learners’ Pragmatics: Divergence from the Norm by Andrew Cohen, University of Minnesota. The session will start with a brief introduction on just what L2 pragmatics is all about. Then we will look at divergence from L2 pragmatic norms. Participants will then be invited to do an exercise in pairs or small groups where they get…

Television advertising provides versatile authentic materials for learning Italian language and culture, as it constitutes a privileged point of entrance for analyses of Italian society through its rich network of cultural references – feature films, TV shows, songs, newspapers, magazines, as well as other advertisements. Further, the cross-cultural dimension of TV advertising prompts critical examination…

This presentation describes a semester-length sequence of lessons structured around closely-watched film clips for fourth-semester Spanish. Based on the implementation of these lessons this semester, and of an analogous application in Italian 4, straightforward guidelines will be presented for the design of sequences of lessons that guide students from a passive to a critical and…

Languages such as Czech, with complex grammatical marking and a vocabulary very different from English, are challenging to teach at the elementary level. My project starts from the premise that using a broad range of authentic cultural material, including excerpts from articles, ads, menus, film clips, and songs as the basis for grammatical exposition, drills,…