Newsletter Articles Archive

Web postings of the BLC Newsletter articles are filed here.

Third Place in the French classroom: A separate space for a new beginning?

By Letizia Allais
Published Jan 15, 2012
2 Comments
Filed in Curricular Development, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

As someone who is Italian, was raised in France, and has lived in the U.S. for ten years, and as the new mother of an American-born baby, I am fascinated by topics that explore the sometimes multiple identity crises that multilingual individuals face. What does it mean to be multilingual? What effect does it have on one’s sense of self? On one’s relationship with others? What is a mother tongue? Where does it start? Where does it end? These are all questions that spark debates  →  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

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
2 Comments
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

Are You Another Person When You Speak Another Language?

By Claire Kramsch
Published Jun 03, 2011
1 Comments
Filed in Newsletter Articles

Dear Graduating Class, Dear Parents, Relatives, and Friends: On this day of celebration, many of you will be celebrating and talking about this graduation in many different languages. You will be dreaming of it in Spanish, raving about it in Korean, and in the years to come, who knows? You might remember it in German, or tell your children about it in Chinese. Along the way someone is sure to ask you, “Tell me: Are you another person when you speak another language?” Three  →  Read in full

Creating Classroom Audio Material from Bulgarian Radio

By Traci Lindsey
Published Jan 15, 2011
1 Comments
Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

Bulgarian is a less commonly taught language with fewer than 9 million speakers worldwide, and consequently, though there is an excellent textbook and reference grammar available, listening materials are in short supply. In the semesters I spent as a GSI for Bulgarian, I sought ways to incorporate authentic aural material into the course to give students experience with the spoken language beyond what I was able to provide, and it was out of these attempts that I developed my BLC  →  Read in full

Writing as a Social Act: A Genre-based Approach to Writing Pedagogy in the Foreign Lang. Classroom

By William Heidenfeldt
Published Jan 15, 2011
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

Introduction As both students and instructors of foreign languages move into intermediate- and advanced-level courses, they participate in increasingly more complex interactions with each other and also with the texts that they study and create. Students in the second-year French program (French 3 and 4) are expected to work equally in the four areas of language study: speaking, listening, reading, and writing, preparing them for more critical discussions, reading, and writing.  →  Read in full

Cultivating Awareness: Register and Context in First-Year Arabic

By Jason Vivrette
Published Sep 15, 2010
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

The teaching of Arabic in American universities today, like that of so many other more commonly taught foreign languages, has by and large come to be guided by the same communicative approach objectives that regularly inform the profession as a whole, such that curricula frequently place an explicit emphasis on the development of the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. While there is little question about the fundamental importance of these skills as part of a  →  Read in full

Blogging in SL/FL Classrooms: New(?) Directions?

By Usree Bhattacharya
Published Sep 15, 2010
2 Comments
Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

Introduction: In recent years, a growing number of educators have begun utilizing “blogs” in Second Language (SL) and Foreign Language (FL) learning environments, to promising results (e.g. Campbell, 2003; Johnson, 2004; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; Richardson, 2004; Thorne, Webber, & Bensinger 2005). In language learning contexts, blogs can serve a variety of tasks, including allowing students to narrativize the language learning process, facilitating discussions of culture  →  Read in full

Late Summer Reads

By Dave Malinowski
Published Aug 04, 2010
2 Comments
Filed in BLC News, Newsletter Articles

Here in Berkeley, the warm afternoons are met on both sides by chilly, foggy mornings and evenings—a reminder that summer is advancing and the fall semester is just around the corner. But before you rush off to start lesson planning or finish buying your school supplies, how about taking advantage of the remaining time and doing a little late summer reading? Below are a few suggestions for reads both long and short, new and old, in a variety of media, and grouped around a few focal  →  Read in full

Teaching Zulu Language and Culture Through Film

By Galen Sibanda
Published Jan 15, 2010
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

Many studies show that film or “video has vast potential for enriching language study and making it more enjoyable and effective” (Wood 1992). My fall 2009 BLC Fellow’s project is a demonstration of how film can complement other materials used in class (especially the textbook) by tapping this resource. It involved cutting and preparing Zulu video clips from a feature film and developing from them exercises later used with my Beginning Zulu class. The goals were to improve  →  Read in full

Using Blogs to Teach Spanish 4

By Heather McMichael
Published Jan 15, 2010
2 Comments
Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships

1. Introduction Blogs written in Spanish are a particularly rich source of contextualized language in use—they are freely available, universally accessible, widely varied, highly interactive, and generally appealing to students. However, some of the same qualities that make blogs attractive for use in a Spanish class also present challenges, especially with regard to their use as a pedagogical tool in our institutional setting. For example, compared to a textbook, blogs are vast;  →  Read in full

Online Communication in Beginning Spanish Instruction

By Adam Mendelson
Published Sep 15, 2009
2 Comments
Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships, Newsletter, Volume 25, Issue 1

Prior research indicates that providing language learners with opportunities to interact with one another through online communication tools can promote positive outcomes such as increased motivation, diversified participation, and improved oral production (Lamy & Hampel, 2007). However, with the exception of Blake’s (2000) suggestion that jigsaw activities are especially effective for promoting negotiation of meaning in online chat, I was unable to find other guidelines in the  →  Read in full

Literacy in First-Year Turkish: A Multi-Voiced Approach

By Kristin Dickinson
Published Sep 15, 2009
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Filed in Curricular Development, Media, Newsletter Articles, Research, BLC Fellowships, Newsletter, Volume 25, Issue 1

My BLC project was conceived largely as an extension of Jason Vivrette’s fall 2008 project for first-semester Turkish. Through a series of film clips that emphasized the multi-cultural nature of Turkish society, Jason encouraged students to reflect critically on both the concept of Turkishness as well as the experience of learning Turkish in an American classroom.  I continued this work in the second-semester classroom through a literacy-based pedagogical approach. My main goal  →  Read in full

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