BLC Fellows Reports Archive

Results in BLC Posts

Representing a Foreign Culture: Cultural Learning During Study Abroad

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…

From a Face-to-Face to Hybrid Intermediate Korean Course

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…

Zapotec Language Revitalization: What can be accomplished with a two-week Summer School

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…

Highly Varied Proficiency Levels in the Same Classroom — Differentiated Instruction as a Means of Effective Language Teaching

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…

Developing Curricular Materials for Kurdish Language Instruction

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 While the outdated grammar books are specifically targeted for linguists interested in comparative linguistics or grammatical and linguistic analysis of the Kurdish language and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

Developing Interpretive Insight through Reframing Texts

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…

From Communities of Practice to the Emergence of Thirdness: Voices, Identities, and Subject Positions of Chinese International Students in the U.S.

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…

Teaching French Listening Comprehension and Cultural Awareness through Regional Variation

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…

Adding A Robust Cultural Component in Elementary Tibetan

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…

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