Travel Reports Archive

From February 16-17, 2018, I attended and presented at the Third International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages in UCLA. I presented a paper called “More than Tourists: Using Critical Pedagogy to Teach Filipino Heritage Learners.” This paper explored what it means to teach Filipino at UC Berkeley within the framework of critical pedagogy, and how this…

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…

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…

I attended the 49th Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Chicago, Illinois, with funding from the Berkeley Language Center. While there, I presented a pedagogy paper and participated in a round table on Transgressions in Library Data. My paper, entitled “Having It All: Culture and the Four Skills…

Recently, I attended the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association’s 71st annual convention in Spokane, Washington. I have been participating in the conference for many years now and, without exception, always come away reinvigorated and full of new ideas. I usually alternate my presentations between literature and pedagogy. As I gave a paper on pedagogy last…

I attended the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2017 conference in Portland, Oregon, in March. I presented my research entitled Cross-language discrimination of Korean consonants. My presentation provides a cross-linguistic perceptual test of Korean consonants by ten native speakers each of Chinese, English, and Korean. The study examines the misperception or insensitivity to native…

In November, 2016 I attended the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies annual convention, held in Washington DC. This conference is the premier North American conference for scholars of language, literature, and culture of the East European and Eurasian regions. I have regularly participated in this conference since 2009. Engaging with other area…

ACTFL is a convention where language educators from all over the world get together to share and discuss the most recent research and trends in foreign/second language teaching. My experience of the convention last year was that is was focused on the “business” of teaching. This year the conference focused more on the processes of…

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…