Author: Victoria Williams

Over the past decades the graphic novel has witnessed both increased popularity among readers as well as cultural and intellectual prestige among critics and academics alike – but what is its place within the foreign language classroom? Through a case study of first-year Spanish instruction, this presentation will address strategies for how language instructors can…

Swahili History, Culture and Identity Reconsidered I attended the Baraza conference that was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, UK on October 29, 2016. I was scheduled to present a paper titled, “Integrating Chat in the writing of African Languages.” Papers of interesting topics were presented by…

I recently attended the Rocky Mountain Language Association’s 70th annual convention in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have been participating in the conference for many years now and, without exception, always come away reinvigorated and full of new ideas. As a Senior Lecturer with limited university funding options, I can only attend one conference a…

I attended InterSpeech 2016 in San Francisco, California, in September, with my colleague and 2nd presenter, Minsook Kim. We presented our research entitled “Hyper-articulate production of Korean glides by age group”. InterSpeech is the one of the largest conferences in the area of phonetics and we were surprised to see that there were a lot…

Surveys are ubiquitous in all facets of life: we hear survey results in news reports, we find them at the end of almost every event, and they always seem to find their way into our inboxes. Surveys can also be useful tools in language teaching and research. For my BLC project, I developed and piloted…

We have grown accustomed to perceiving the arts and language as very different kinds of engagements: the former transgressive and creative, the latter structured and acquired. This talk presents a blueprint for an advanced Italian language course (102) that approaches language and design as analogous processes. Tracing how the coordinates of space and time are…

Driven by the goal of helping students at all levels appreciate the complex, multiple perspectives that exist among speakers of Russian, and to supplement existing video materials for Russian instruction, I spent the summer of 2015 videotaping interviews of native Russian speakers responding to various questions about their lives and values. These interviews allow students…

The BLC computer facility in B-21 Dwinelle will be open during the 2016 fall semester on the following schedule: Monday through Thursday, 8:00 - 6:00, and Friday, 8:00 - 5:00, from August 24 through December 2. Schedules for RRR and finals weeks will be posted toward the end of the semester. B-21 will be closed…

Ronelle Alexander, Professor, Slavic Languages, UC Berkeley Ellen Elias-Bursać, Independent Scholar Writing a Textbook for a Newly Fractured Language: Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian When Yugoslavia broke apart, its major official language – Serbo-Croatian – ceased to exist. The replacement of Yugoslavia by several separate ethnically-based states (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc.), also entailed the replacement of the…

PanLex, a project of the Long Now Foundation, is spending this summer at the Berkeley Language Center with 29 interns and 5 staff researching and analyzing lexical data on hundreds of lesser-known languages. Like a panlingual digital dictionary, PanLex aims to enable the translation of words from any language into all languages to support machine…