Travel Reports Archive

I recently participated in the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association’s 67th annual conference in Vancouver, Washington. The RMMLA continues to be one of the best literature and language conferences. It has great variety, excellent presentations, and a genuine esprit de corps among participants. Everyone is always willing to share and discuss their ideas about teaching…

Thanks to generous support from the BLC, I was able to attend the weeklong International Convention of Teachers of German (ITD, Internationale Tagung der Deutschlehrer und Deutschlehrerinnen), which took place in summer 2013 in Bolzano, the capital of Italy’s autonomous province of South Tyrol, where a special statute protects the rights of a German-speaking minority.…

From October 10-12, 2013, I attended the sixty-seventh annual Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) convention held in Vancouver, WA. The RMMLA is a regional MLA convention only by name. In reality, the convention surpasses the regional limits of the Rocky Mountains by including wide-ranging scholarship and academics from the entire country as well as…

With the increased interest in studying Arabic as a foreign language in universities around the world, the field of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) attempts to respond to the needs of students and programs by creating Arabic language instructional materials and pioneering much needed research in the field. Because of the generous grant…

A few weeks ago, I attended my first-ever African Language Teachers Association (ALTA) conference in Chicago. In my past profession as a journalist, I had attended numerous conferences, but mostly as a speaker, trainer, or chair of a panel. But I went to the ALTA conference mostly as a student, which made it one of…

This past December, I participated in The 2012 International Conference of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language Conference. In this conference, there were several topics covered. The ones that stood out exceptionally were: Teaching Methodology, Language Analysis, Research, and Material and Grammatical Analysis and Presentation. I found these topics to be very helpful to my…

I attended the AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) Dallas 2013 in Dallas, Texas, March, 2013. I presented my research entitled “L2 accent transfer in L3 production: Evidence from L3 Korean”. This is my first participation in AAAL, which I’ve heard a lot from the Applied Linguistics people and yes, it was a valuable opportunity…

This year the AAS (Association for Asian Studies) Annual Conference was held in San Diego, March 21-24. I myself took part in a roundtable titled “New Approaches to Teaching Advanced Level Vietnamese Language to Heritage and Non-Heritage Students.” A short abstract of our discussion can be found online, at http://www.asian-studies.org/conference, and conveniently included below for…

Thanks to the BLC and its generous travel grant, I was able to attend the 2012 Chinese Language Teachers Association Conference held in Philadelphia. During the three-day conference, hundreds of Chinese language teachers shared their research results and different views of how to teach Chinese effectively. I was honored to have the opportunity to share…

Once again this year, the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association’s annual conference proved to be as stimulating as ever. I have been presenting papers at the RMMLA for over a decade now and every year, without exception, the RMMLA delivers an excellent variety of interdisciplinary literature and pedagogy sessions, high quality presentations, and a genuine…