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 group. By making visible the contradictions experienced by the translator, this paper illuminates barriers to accomplishing mutual understanding and demonstrates the creative ways these interlocutors exploited the gap between languages.
David Malinowski, UC Berkeley
How do you move between languages when you’ve got no body? Lessons from online French lessons at Berkeley
While universities like UC Berkeley endeavor to expand online education, and skeptics point to the loss of the “on-campus experience” and “live environment” of the traditional classroom, few studies address the fundamental role of the student body in learning (Nunes 2006). In this presentation I interpret data from an ongoing videoconferencing exchange between French learners in Berkeley and French teachers in France through a dialogic lens, arguing that the difficulties faced by language learners and their words to move online afford a unique lesson in this debate.
Tim Wolcott, San Francisco State University
Americans in Paris: Myth, desire, and subjectivity in student accounts of study abroad in France
Since the late 1990’s, applied linguistics research on study abroad has increasingly focused on how student identity (or identities) has influenced language-learning outcomes. In particular, this research underscores how students tend to cling to identities – understood largely in national terms – that compromise their ability to “negotiate difference” in study abroad contexts. In this paper, I examine the case of an American undergraduate studying abroad in Paris whose struggles to negotiate difference highlight not so much an intransigent American habitus but rather a deeply personal and emotional attempt to reconcile the symbolic values she assigns to her national, ethnic and imagined identities as she attempts to “move between languages” while abroad.
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