Media Archive

Learning Italian Through Television Advertising

By Marco Purpura
Published Mar 06, 2013
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Research, BLC Fellowships, Featured

Television advertising provides versatile authentic materials for learning Italian language and culture, as it constitutes a privileged point of entrance for analyses of Italian society through its rich network of cultural references – feature films, TV shows, songs, newspapers, magazines, as well as other advertisements. Further, the cross-cultural dimension of TV advertising prompts critical examination of the global circulation of national identities – for example, the role  →  Read in full

Using Film to Teach Cultural Analysis Skills in L2: A Pragmatic Guide

By Juan Caballero, GSR, Comparative Literature
Published Feb 07, 2013
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Research, BLC Fellowships, Featured

This presentation describes a semester-length sequence of lessons structured around closely-watched film clips for fourth-semester Spanish. Based on the implementation of these lessons this semester, and of an analogous application in Italian 4, straightforward guidelines will be presented for the design of sequences of lessons that guide students from a passive to a critical and analytic relation to film. These guidelines address issues both at the level of sequence design (spread  →  Read in full

Language through Culture: Developing an Integrative Curriculum for First-Year Czech

By Ellen Langer, Lecturer, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Published Feb 07, 2013
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Research, BLC Fellowships, Featured

Languages such as Czech, with complex grammatical marking and a vocabulary very different from English, are challenging to teach at the elementary level. My project starts from the premise that using a broad range of authentic cultural material, including excerpts from articles, ads, menus, film clips, and songs as the basis for grammatical exposition, drills, and classroom discussion improves both student learning and morale. My BLC project was to create a chapter of an online  →  Read in full

Rearticulating culture in a place in-between: The multimodal experiences of hearing mothers

By Jennifer Johnson
Published Oct 04, 2012
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Research, BLC Fellowships

Culture has been commonly understood as something we “have”, acquired through membership in a community rather than something socio-ideologically situated that we “do” bodily in and through language. Through videotaped interviews with hearing mothers of deaf children discussing their language experiences in the visual world of their deaf child, I attempt to shape an emergent notion of culture as a site of struggle which includes multiple modes of communication via speech,  →  Read in full

Language and History through Silent Film in the Foreign Language Classroom

By Daniel Brooks
Published Sep 12, 2012
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Research, BLC Fellowships

Silent cinema represents a useful tool for foreign language instruction precisely because of its lack of verbalized dialogue. Cinematic silence can be used to demonstrate the connections between visual and verbal meaning, provide unique material for a variety of writing projects and in-class exercises, and facilitate discussion about the function of language in genre and narrative. If properly contextualized within a comparative framework, silent films and other historical  →  Read in full

Every Object Tells a Story: Searching for Finnishness among Bay Area Finns

By Sirpa Tuomainen
Published Aug 30, 2012
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Research, BLC Fellowships

Immigrant homes often display artifacts of cultural, historic, and ethnic importance. I have looked into the meaningful objects that Bay Area Finns of different generations and age groups hold dear to their hearts. The owners find nostalgic connections with these objects as they keep negotiating and recreating their Finnishness. This talk discusses the many fragilities found: the fragility of the objects themselves, of their nostalgic connections, of the objects’ true ethnic  →  Read in full

The Parrot’s Two Feet: Teaching French in Contact with Arabic

By Jonathan Haddad
Published Aug 16, 2012
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Research, BLC Fellowships

How can the language classroom account for the ecologies of language that generate bilingual and multilingual practices, attitudes, and cultural products? Using texts and media that incorporate French and Arabic, this project develops lesson plans to engage students in the critical appraisal of the values, agencies, and registers that shape language use in francophone cultures.  Download article as PDF

Lecture, February 17, 2012: Mark Kaiser, Rossella Carbotti

By Orlando Garcia
Published Feb 18, 2012
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Filed in Curricular Development, Events, Lecture Series, Media

Language in Film and the Language of Film: Two Semiotic Systems Engaged by Mark Kaiser and Rossella Carbotti, University of California, Berkeley This presentation addresses the use of film clips in the foreign language classroom. Our main focus will be on film as text and how language use in film works in tandem with cinematic devices to create meaning. We will provide a number of examples from a variety of languages (Italian, Russian, Japanese, Arabic), and provide a framework  →  Read in full

Large Sound Files Got Your Students Down?

By Mark Kaiser
Published Jan 17, 2012
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Filed in BLC News, Media

Many of our textbooks come with accompanying CD/DVDs with audio and video files. Often, those sound files consist of a long reading of a chapter’s vocabulary, word after word. Keith Hernandez, the BLC’s recording technician, has developed an algorithm to break those sound files into individual files consisting of one word or phrase each. Students who wish to attach sound files to electronic flash cards (such as Provoc), will find the individual files quite useful. Please contact  →  Read in full

Teaching Intertextuality and Recontextualization through Music

By Maya Smith
Published Jan 15, 2012
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Filed in Curricular Development, Events, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

Sensing the opportunity to provide a pedagogical model for the use of music in foreign language teaching, I have created activities that uncover and highlight themes of intertextuality, recontextualization, recognizability, and (re)appropriation through close readings of songs and other cultural texts to which they are linked. My activities are designed to show students how texts shed light on ideological, cultural, and symbolic systems. In order to give instructors access to these  →  Read in full

L2 Journal Special Issue now available

By Mark Kaiser
Published Nov 01, 2011
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Filed in BLC News, Curricular Development, Media, Research

The special issue of L2 Journal, “Teaching Language, Culture, and Text with Film” is now available here. Contents: “Teaching Japanese Pragmatic Competence Using Film Clips” by Wakae Kambara. “The Five C’s: Bringing a 1980’s Film into the 21st Century Chinese Language Learning Context” by Gloria Bien. “Rebels with a Cause: (Re)defining Identities and Culture in Contemporary French Cinema” by Sebastien Dubreil. “Teaching Chinese Cultural Perspectives through Film” by Lihua  →  Read in full

Language and culture in documentaries by Italian women filmmakers

By Mara Mauri Jacobsen
Published Sep 15, 2011
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

In spring 2009, a 25-minute documentary, Il corpo delle donne (The Body of Women), composed of images selected from 400 hours of television programs, exerted an unexpected impact on an Italian public which over the years had become uncomplainingly accustomed to seeing women made objects of the most explicit forms of degradation, humiliation, and misogyny. Suddenly meaning took on form, jumped to the Internet, and traveled the globe, where it was translated into many languages  →  Read in full

Teaching Japanese Pragmatic Competence Using Film Clips

By Wakae Kambara
Published Sep 15, 2011
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

In all 1st- through 3rd-year Japanese courses at UC Berkeley, students are expected to write several skits over the course of the semester. Each skit is submitted to the instructor for corrections, after which students perform the skit in class. Students appear to enjoy these oral quizzes. While checking 3rd-year Japanese students’ scripts, I have noticed a pattern of student errors consisting of sentences that are grammatically correct, but that sound unnatural. Here are a few  →  Read in full

Russian Phonetics: Sound and Meaning in Russian Avant-Garde Poetry

By Lucas Stratton
Published Sep 15, 2011
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

A website curriculum for teaching Russian phonetics and avant-garde literary culture. Website address: https://sites.google.com/a/fulbrightmail.org/russian-phonetics-through-avant-garde-poetry/ The idea for this project emerged from of my experience teaching Russian at Berkeley and my own budding dissertation work on Russian avant-garde poetry. As a graduate student instructor of Russian—and a student in the throes of research—I became increasingly convinced not only of the  →  Read in full

California Language Archive is now live

By Mark Kaiser
Published Jun 20, 2011
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Filed in BLC News, Media, Collections and Archives

We are pleased to announce that the Audio Archive of Linguistic Field Recordings and the Survey of California and Other Indigenous Languages have merged their databases and are now accessible through the portal site California Language Archive. The Audio Archive contains 1700+ hours of recordings of stories, songs/chants, and elicitation of linguistic data in 221 collections accessioned from the 1950’s to the present day. The Survey’s holdings include field notes, unpublished  →  Read in full

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