Chika Shibahara Appointed Coordinator of Academic Outreach

The Berkeley Language Center is pleased to announce that in fall 2014, Chika Shibahara of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures will begin a three-year appointment as the BLC Coordinator of Academic Outreach.

Chika Shibahara holds two masters degrees, one from Kyoto Women’s University in English literature (her master’s thesis was on Zen in J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories), the second from San Francisco State University in teaching Japanese as a second language. Prior to coming to Berkeley, she taught in Hawaii, Washington, and the greater Bay area. She has taught first- through fourth-year Japanese at Berkeley since 1993, and for the past several years has focused on third-year Japanese and on the literature and culture courses in fourth-year Japanese.

She is a coauthor of Elementary Japanese, a first-year Japanese textbook. She has presented at conferences in Japan and the U.S., most recently giving two presentations at the November 2013 Foreign Language Association of Northern California (FLANC) Conference: Developing Students’ Symbolic Competence through Film and Eiga o toriireta jugyou no kokoromi [A classroom experiment in adopting film]. Currently, she is working on an article for the L2 Journal on using film in advanced language classes.

An avid reader and viewer of film, Chika has traveled extensively and studied the tea ceremony and ikebana. Please join me and the Berkeley Language Center staff in congratulating Chika and welcoming her to her new role.

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