Results in BLC Posts
Posted by Victoria Williams on August 16, 2012
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. …
Posted by Victoria Williams on January 15, 2012
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…
Posted by Victoria Williams on January 15, 2012
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…
Posted by Victoria Williams on September 15, 2011
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.…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on September 15, 2011
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…
Posted by Victoria Williams on September 15, 2011
A website curriculum for teaching Russian phonetics and avant-garde literary culture. Website address: https://sites.google.com/a/fulbrightmail.org/russian-phonetics-through-avant-garde-poetry/ The idea for this project emerged from of my experience teaching Russian at Berkeley and my own budding dissertation work on Russian avant-garde poetry. As a graduate student instructor of Russian—and a student in the throes of research—I became increasingly convinced…
Posted by Victoria Williams on January 15, 2011
Bulgarian is a less commonly taught language with fewer than 9 million speakers worldwide, and consequently, though there is an excellent textbook and reference grammar available, listening materials are in short supply. In the semesters I spent as a GSI for Bulgarian, I sought ways to incorporate authentic aural material into the course to give…
Posted by Victoria Williams on January 15, 2011
Telugu belongs to the Dravidian language family and is the second most spoken language in India with more than 80 million speakers. Telugu is mainly spoken in and is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. It was given classical language status by the Government of India in 2008 because of…
Posted by Victoria Williams on January 15, 2011
Introduction As both students and instructors of foreign languages move into intermediate- and advanced-level courses, they participate in increasingly more complex interactions with each other and also with the texts that they study and create. Students in the second-year French program (French 3 and 4) are expected to work equally in the four areas of…
Posted by Victoria Williams on September 15, 2010
The teaching of Arabic in American universities today, like that of so many other more commonly taught foreign languages, has by and large come to be guided by the same communicative approach objectives that regularly inform the profession as a whole, such that curricula frequently place an explicit emphasis on the development of the four…