BLC Fellows Reports Archive

Hiring signs at Pappy's Grill & Sports Bar in Berkeley, CA. Photo: Bronwyn Harris As a BLC Fellow during the Spring of 2020, I worked on the development of a new, upper-division course regarding the presence of Spanish in urban signage. In this report, I will share the advances made in the process of designing…

Research on academic socialization has predominately focused on the L2 educational experiences of international students. While FL research has increasingly emphasized “multiliteracies” and “intercultural learning,” literacy in an FL continues to be understood as the use of new words and grammar combined with familiar reading and writing practices. This paper highlights the potential to socialize…

What do we learn about a culture when we travel abroad? In this research study, I adopted a Piagetian perspective to understand how students represent a foreign culture before and after study abroad. I contacted four UC Berkeley students who did not initially speak French and who were not familiar with French culture, and I…

The Korean program has had a high attrition rate from beginning (K1A) to intermediate levels (K10B) (AY 2017: 77%). In searching for a solution to this trend, my colleague, Dr. Junghee Park and I received a one-year joint BLC fellowship to develop a hybrid course for intermediate level Korean. As I report for the first…

Humanity is facing a language endangerment crisis on a global level, as indigenous languages are increasingly being replaced by widely spoken languages like English and Spanish. In response, communities around the world have initiated efforts to encourage the use of endangered languages. However, little empirical research on what makes these language revitalization efforts most successful…

Instructors of the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) often find themselves in classrooms where students' language proficiency levels vary on a broad scale, spreading from novice to advanced. The question that arises in these situations is how to teach all of the students in a way that will provide for each of their individual language-progression…

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 While the outdated grammar books are specifically targeted for linguists interested in comparative linguistics or grammatical and linguistic analysis of the Kurdish language and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…