Author: Victoria Williams

World Language teachers and credential candidates are invited to participate in professional development that “Connects Teachers and Students to World Languages”.  Foundations for Effective Language Teaching I and II will be offered on five Saturdays. Topics include the new California Standards, communicative units that incorporate culturally authentic resources, and effective strategies to engage diverse learners.…

In August I was invited to attend a translation workshop in Seneffe, Belgium. The workshop brought together several translators of the Belgium author Jean-Philippe Toussaint to work on his latest novel, La Vérité sur Marie. I was one of a six translators attending this particular workshop, although the center itself (Centre Européen de Traduction Littéraire)…

The teaching of Arabic in American universities today, like that of so many other more commonly taught foreign languages, has by and large come to be guided by the same communicative approach objectives that regularly inform the profession as a whole, such that curricula frequently place an explicit emphasis on the development of the four…

Introduction: In recent years, a growing number of educators have begun utilizing “blogs” in Second Language (SL) and Foreign Language (FL) learning environments, to promising results (e.g. Campbell, 2003; Johnson, 2004; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; Richardson, 2004; Thorne, Webber, & Bensinger 2005). In language learning contexts, blogs can serve a variety of tasks, including allowing…

Greetings! I have started a bSpace project site to unite second-year language instructors teaching foreign languages/ESL across departments at Berkeley. I have set up the site to allow anyone with a Berkeley address to join it. It is called SECOND YEAR SHARE FAIR. Although not all intermediate classes are going to be at the same…

The Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley announces an opening for a tenure-track or tenured appointment at the Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor rank in English Language Learning/Bilingual Education, starting July 1, 2011. This is a full time position with a nine-month academic year appointment, and it is in the Language…

Many studies show that film or “video has vast potential for enriching language study and making it more enjoyable and effective” (Wood 1992). My fall 2009 BLC Fellow’s project is a demonstration of how film can complement other materials used in class (especially the textbook) by tapping this resource. It involved cutting and preparing Zulu…

1. Introduction Blogs written in Spanish are a particularly rich source of contextualized language in use—they are freely available, universally accessible, widely varied, highly interactive, and generally appealing to students. However, some of the same qualities that make blogs attractive for use in a Spanish class also present challenges, especially with regard to their use…

This semester, together with the invaluable input of my colleagues in the Berkeley Language Center, fellow first-year Turkish GSI, Kristin Dickinson, and Mellon Lecturer in Turkish, Ayla Algar, I developed a semester’s worth of activities for Turkish 1A (Elementary Modern Turkish) built around film clips taken from Turkish cinema, with one film clip or sequence…

The Spring 2007 issue opens with A Conversation with Jim Negri: A View from the High School by Mark Kaiser. Also included are several short reports from lecturers Giovanni Biasin (Italian), Seda Chavdarian (French), Agnes Dimitriou (Spanish and Portuguese), and Sarah Roberts (French). The BLC Fellows’ Reports are from Agnes Mazur (PhD Candidate, Education), Elena…