Author: Victoria Williams

Towards the end of February, I presented at the “Teaching for Active and Engaged Learning” conference, which is part of the annual Lilly Conferences on Evidence Based Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed. This conference serves as a platform for the presentation of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Educators from many universities and colleges…

The limited body of materials for teaching the Kurdish language has various shortcomings. While the outdated grammar books are specifically targeted for linguists interested in comparative linguistics or grammatical and linguistic analysis of the Kurdish language and ethnography, more recent textbooks suffer from numerous problems, most noticeably the scope and sequence of grammar topics as…

This project focused on the interpretive insight that second-semester students of French developed when reframing texts in the target language. The process of reframing texts in a collaborative setting followed a tripartite model involving preparation, enactment, and post-enactment reflection and was aimed at developing linguistic skills and increasing cultural knowledge in the target language. The…

Based on data collected from in-depth interviews with 15 Chinese international students enrolled in a large public university in the U.S., this exploratory study brings to the fore the heterogeneous and contentious nature of negotiating one’s voices, identities, and subject positions as an international student in a transnational milieu. The findings of this study cast…

This report details work done in Fall 2017 to research and design a new travel/study program to Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia in summer 2018. This UCB faculty-led program is entitled “Balkan Bridges: Contested Histories, Shared Commitments” and treats ongoing legacies of war, as well as exemplary moments of peace, in the former Yugoslavia over the…

At the university level, French language instruction in the US traditionally includes a course on phonetics and pronunciation. While the major aim of such courses is to improve students’ speaking and listening competence, they also emphasize speaking ‘correctly’ using standardized, metropolitan French. In this project I propose a curriculum that emphasizes the diversity of spoken…

Two types of students tend to enroll in the Elementary Tibetan course: those with a strong interest in Tibetan culture and those with a strong interest in Tibetan linguistics. During this fellowship I have created several modules that introduce cultural material in a mixed English and Tibetan format in an effort to meet the expectations…

Between December 15 and 17, 2017, I attended and presented at a conference titled: “Approaches and Challenges in Arabic Language Pedagogy” at the American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt. This conference is one of the very few conferences focused on the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language. This was a chance to get…

Conjugating Catalonia:  Language Learning in Turbulent Times Greta Vollmer, Professor Emerita, English & Applied Linguistics, Sonoma State University Language learning is, as we know, a complex process.  Yet when I chose to study Catalan in Spain last year, little did I know that I would receive an even greater education in the complexities of bilingualism…

To Operate between Cultures and Languages: (Multilingual) Transnational Films in Foreign Language Classes Gabrielle Blell, University of Hannover, Germany Our societies have undergone two major changes during the last decades: firstly, the continuous rise of cultural and linguistic diversity, due to the global economy, migration and universal mobility, and secondly, the steady expansion and gathering…