Research 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

Introducing the Teachers’ Forum

By Mark Kaiser
Published Oct 29, 2012
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Filed in BLC News, Curricular Development, Research

CALL FOR PAPERS Since its establishment in 2009, L2 Journal has published a variety of quality research papers on different aspects of language learning and teaching, reaching a wide audience of interested scholars, educators, and students. The journal has also published several special issues on important topics in applied linguistics and second language acquisition. This Fall, we are proud to announce the introduction of a new section in the journal, Teachers’ Forum,  →  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
2 Comments
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

Visiting Scholars at BLC, Spring 2012

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

The BLC is pleased to welcome four Visiting Scholars this spring. Julie Kerekes from the University of Toronto will be on the Berkeley campus until June. Her research while at Berkeley will be on the employment trajectories of internationally educated professionals. Xueli Wang, from the Peoples Republic of China will be here until December. She is pursuing research on the role of ambiguity in foreign language classroom instruction. Sun Young Oh will be here until the end of  →  Read in full

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

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

Colloquium: Moving Between Languages: Research Perspectives

By Rick Kern
Published Oct 07, 2011
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Filed in Events, Research

Friday, October 7, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM, B-4 Dwinelle Hall Opening remarks by Claire Kramsch, UC Berkeley Elizabeth Boner, San Francisco State University Negotiating relationship through translation: How American development practitioners and Tanzanian beneficiaries exploit the gap between languages This paper examines the practice of translation within meetings between American development practitioners and Tanzanian representatives of a local Women’s savings and credit  →  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

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