Welcome from the Directors

Welcome to the Berkeley Language Center (BLC)! We are an engaged community of lecturers, senate faculty, center directors, graduate students, and undergraduate students, and we collaborate with local, national, and international teachers and scholars. Together, we are teachers, language activists, and lifelong learners committed to supporting and celebrating multilingualism and multiculturalism.

Founded in 1994, the BLC is a unit in the Division of Arts and Humanities of the College of Letters and Science. Since then, we have served as an intellectual, pedagogical, and technological hub that supports the teaching of approximately 58 languages on the Berkeley campus. Our disciplinary roots in applied language studies, second language acquisition, and world languages pedagogy position us uniquely on campus. For instructors, we offer opportunities to engage with these disciplines (e.g. theory, research) and explore how they can inform the development of new and innovative curricular projects. For graduate and undergraduate students, we support their exploration of what applied language studies is and how its study engages with key questions of ideology, identity, and meaning making that center language(s) and other semiotic systems. 

At the BLC, we consider language and culture learning to involve much more than the accumulation of skills, and its goals to extend far beyond transactional goals of being able to order a cup of coffee. Language and culture learning also involves awareness of interculturality, reflections on meaning making processes, and the development of symbolic competence, including understandings of how power operates in and through language. We would like to express our admiration for the committed and passionate language instructors on campus who do all this, and more.

Given the centrality of language in everything we do, it’s important to recognize that there are lots of ways of thinking about what language is- language as grammatical structures and patterns, language as social practice, language as discourse, language as meaning making, and, with the advent of AI, even language as statistical probabilities. Technology plays a central role in mediating not only these understandings of language but also language learning processes and practices themselves. Therefore, with the launch of our new language and AI initiative, we also situate ourselves as a hub for research in machine translation and generative AI. Currently, we are realizing a project entitled “Translating Machine Translation for Language Education to Promote Language Learning, Critical Digital Literacies, and Global Citizenship," supported by a USDOE International Research & Studies Program Grant. 

We invite you to explore more about us (including more on our team, our mission, our history); the resources we have available; and our different initiatives. We also invite you to drop by one of our upcoming events as well as check out our past events. 

We look forward to seeing you in the basement hallway of Dwinelle!

Sincerely,

Kimberly Vinall, Executive Director

Emily Hellmich, Associate Director