Author: Orlando Garcia

Digitizing Dunhuang: The Virtual Recreation of a Mediaeval Library Cave by Imre Galambos, Overseas Project Manager, IDP, British Library The opening of the Dunhuang cave library in the early 1900’s has been the largest discovery of medieval manuscripts ever.  The world’s earliest and largest paper archive, the cave’s contents included many unique documents, including the…

Fifty Probably True and Useful Findings from SLA by Richard Schmidt, Professor, Department of Second Language Studies, Director, National foreign Language Resource Center, University of Hawai’i-Manoa There is no generally accepted theory of Second Language Acquisition (SLA).  Indeed, major competing theories conflict in terms of such basic assumptions as the nature of language and the…

Language Policy and the Ecological Turn by Alastair Pennycook, Professor of Languages in Education, Faculty of Education, University of Technology, Sydney Although the notion of language ecology has been both popular and productive as a way of understanding language and environment, drawing our attention to the ways in which languages are embedded in social, cultural,…

Fall 2004 BLC Fellows Instructional Development Research Projects   University Classroom Language for IGSI’s Ellen Rosenfield, Lecturer, GSI Teaching and Resource Center International Graduate Student instructors (IGSIs) need authentic practice materials to prepare themselves for the daunting task of teaching introductory level courses in their disciplines in English.  In addition to learning the appropriate discourse…

Panel Discussion: Gestures in Language Learning Gesture and Language: Reassessing Traditional Boundaries Eve Sweetser, Linguisics Department, UC Berkeley Gesture and language are traditionally treated as two separate and separable phenomena.  They are assumed to be crucially different in “kind” in numerous ways:  gesture is holistic, flexible, and iconic, while language is analytic, conventional, and formally…

Heteroglossia in Foreign Language Classrooms: Research, Debates and Issues by Patricia A. Duff, Associate Professor, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia Research conducted on the use of students’ first vs. second (or third) languages in foreign language (FL) classrooms in the early 1990’s suggested that students deserve and require maximal, high-quality…

Insights into SLA from Less Familiar Settings by Leslie Moore, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for Informal Leaning and Schools, UC Santa Cruz The vast majority of second language acquisition research examines L2 learning and teaching in Europe and North America in formal instructional settings (classrooms and laboratory simulations thereof).  I argue that we must investigate…

BLC Fellows’ Presentation Yiddish Language Heritage and Teaching in the 21st Century Sarah Bailey, PhD Candidate, German Yiddish, the thousand-year-old language of Eastern European Jews, bears many of the characteristics of a heritage language but often is overlooked by researchers in pedagogy (heritage language and otherwise).  In this context, teaching Yiddish two generations after the…

Towards an Ecology of Language by Mary Pratt, Silver Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature, New York University The idea of societies as custodians of their languages has mainly been associated with elitist ideologies aimed at creating class-based linguistic hierarchies.  Egalitarian thought about language has generally opposed prescriptive views.  This however eliminates…

Language Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Symposium   Friday and Saturday, February 20-21, 2004 370 Dwinelle Hall