AY 2025-26 Year in Review

This 2025-2026 year, the Berkeley Language Center (BLC) sought out creative ways to follow through on its central mission: advocating and supporting excellence in language instruction on campus. We revamped our signature Fuel Your Language Teaching Program based on a Learning Group model and offered the first pilot on place-based language learning, which brought together instructors to develop their own place-based classroom activities. The work of the Learning Group was further advanced by Lara Lomicka Anderson’s guest lecture—more on that below! We are very excited to continue exploring this theme with the support of a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

Collaboration at the national, state and campus level was an especially prominent feature of the BLC’s work this year. With the support of the Arts & Humanities Dean’s Office and the L&S Executive Dean’s Office, we participated in a national study conducted by ACTFL designed to better understand why students choose to integrate language learning into their college curriculum (or not). We look forward to sharing the results of this survey locally in AY ’26-’27. The third annual Language & AI conference brought together researchers from across the UCs to discuss the critical issues posed by AI in the language and culture classroom and beyond. And at the campus level, in its second year, the Undergraduate Advisory Council worked to build connections to student cultural clubs and offered the chance to meet and learn from language instructors in February’s Opening Doors Through Language.

The dedication and deep engagement of language instructors propel the BLC mission forward, and this year was no exception. Oksana Willis and Nataliia Goshylyk authored new publications, whileJhonni Carr was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award. Instructors from 24 languages joined us in making this year’s Words in Action a great success for the twelfth performance, and a new Spotlight on Language series highlighted instructional excellence in the classroom. Lihua Zhang contributed a thoughtful essay on symbolic competence and linguistic landscapes in a special issue ofL2 Journal, Multilingual and Intercultural Perspectives in Language Learning: Essays in Honour of Claire Kramsch. Finally, the BLC hosted a spring sendoff, which included celebratory goodbyes to several members of our community. This includes two instructors who retired after decades teaching Chinese and Japanese respectively, Li Joanna Liu and Chika Shibahara. They will be dearly missed by their students and colleagues. We also bid farewell to Sofie Hansen (Department of Scandinavian). And we acknowledged the work of BLC Future of Higher Education Postdoctoral Fellow Rosa Norton, who will be leaving us this summer to move on to the next stage in her professional journey. We offer our warm gratitude for her contributions to our community and best wishes!

Please read on to get a more detailed overview of what we’ve been up to this past year. We appreciate your engagement and support, as ever.

BLC Fall Welcome Reception

BLC Initiatives

Language and AI

Working Group Speakers

The Language and AI Working Group, co-founded by Emily Hellmich, Kayla van Kooten (Graduate Student, Department of German), and Kimberly Vinall, continued to organize talks to showcase research from across campus that engages with machine learning and language. Speakers included Hellina Hailu Nigaut (PhD Candidate, EECS), who presented on language technologies for low-resourced languages; Kent Chang (PhD Candidate, School of Information), who engaged with queer theory and cultural analytics; and Katherine Churchill (Visiting Scholar, Department of English), who explored chatbots and medieval messengers.

Conference: Language and AI: Generating Interdisciplinarity Connections and Possibilities

The BLC and the Language and AI working group also organized a third annual conference that invited researchers and scholars from across the UC’s to think outside the (black) box by going beyond dichotomies to engage productively with AI in language, literature and culture study. Contributors included Dorothy Chun (UC Santa Barbara); Lillian Jones (UC Irvine); Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz); Sophia Minnillo (UC Davis); Ben Spanbock (UC Berkeley); Annie Lamar (UC Santa Barbara); Pratik Sachdeva (UC Berkeley); Eric Van Dusen (UC Berkeley); Tom van Nuenen (UC Berkeley); and Darby Vickers (UC San Diego). The Undergraduate Research Showcase, held the same day, provided a forum to highlight undergraduate research that explores how language, literature, and culture intersect with digital technologies. 

Reimagining Higher Education (RHE) Grant

This year the BLC successfully applied for a RHE Grant for the project Making the Most of the L&S Language Requirement: Establishing a College-Wide Proficiency-Testing Service at the Berkeley Language Center (BLC). We believe that this project represents an important opportunity to work collaboratively to prepare for and make the most of implementing the revised College of L&S Language Requirement in Fall 2026.

The project includes three stages. Phase One focuses on the development of proficiency assessments. In spring 2026, BLC directors developed a robust two-part exam architecture in bCourses which, utilizing training sessions based on best practices in assessment design and piloting, supported instructors of 15 languages to adapt it through a mini-grant program. We wish to extend our gratitude to Anna Knall (GSR, RLL) for her work supporting this phase. Phase Two, implementation, begins this summer with the roll-out of assessments and the renovation of the BLC computer lab, to reopen in the fall. Finally, Phase Three includes the preparation and distribution of recruitment materials, via our website and through department advisors, that highlight the amazing benefits of language study in relation to careers, community, character, and cognition (to be available by fall). Stay tuned for more updates!

BLC Event Series

Fuel Your Language Teaching  (FYLT) Learning Groups

FYLT Learning Groups are a new continued professional learning opportunity for language lecturers. The BLC piloted the series this fall with great success, leading to its continuation in the spring. These Learning Groups are hybrid, one-month workshops that focus on creating concrete activities for the language classroom. In the fall, language lecturer participants explored place-based education as a pedagogical framework that emphasizes building connections to local and global communities to enhance language learning and develop cultural understandings. The spring FYLT learning group focused on transferrable skills, understood as the competencies and attributes developed through language study that can be applied across diverse professional, social, and cultural settings—including critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and flexibility/adaptability. We want to particularly thank Emily Hellmich for contributing her theoretical expertise and for crafting and guiding these learning groups. We are currently planning next year’s FYLT learning groups, which will include a focus on language and AI.

Lecture Series

The BLC lecture series began with a panel titled To study or not to study languages: Student perspectives and potential responses. After Dianna Murphy (University of Wisconsin, Madison) presented findings from two large-scale studies on why students do and do not take language classes, panelists (Claire Tourmen, UCB French Department; Heather Willis Allen, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Kaishan Kong, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; and Elisa Salasin, UCB School of Education) shared specific initiatives that connect language study to careers in different and innovative ways. Additional speakers in the annual lecture series included Beatrice Dupuy (University of Arizona), who outlined the theoretical grounding of digital multimedia composing and demonstrated its pedagogical application through the use of infographics in the L2 classroom, and Marta González-Lloret (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa). The latter highlighted the importance of learning pragmatics to foster successful interaction in digitized, global, and multicultural contexts in order to promote respect and empathy.

In addition to Pranav Anand's (UC Santa Cruz) AI conference keynote exploring how large language models reveal processes that help understand how writing reflects and shapes our thinking, the spring lectures featured Lara Lomicka Anderson (University of South Carolina), who examined how place—understood as physical, cultural, and social space—shapes authentic, embodied, and contextualized language learning. Maya Angela Smith (University of Washington) drew on her own academic research and experience as an educator, inviting participants to explore the question: how can we create a more equitable and inclusive classroom experience?

Undergraduate Programming

Exploring the Boundaries of Translation Contest

This year marked the fifth annual Exploring the Boundaries of Translation undergraduate contest, sponsored by the  BLC and the Found in Translation (FIT) working group. Designed to open spaces of reflection on language and its use and encourage students to ponder how language creates cultural nuance, the contest is now a central feature of BLC undergraduate programming. This year’s winners were Sophia Hawthorne, whose Japanese word was  勿体ない（もったいない) "mottainai"; Xingyu Chen, whose Mandarin word was  缘 "yuán"; and Ariana Mansouri, whose Persian word was  دلتنگی "del-tangi". You can read more about why they considered these words to be untranslatable in The Winners of the 2026 Exploring the Boundaries of Translation Contest. We thank Vesna Rodic of the Found in Translation working group for her continued involvement in this important annual competition and all the undergraduates who participated.

Words in Action: 12th Performance!

For the twelfth time, students and language instructors took to the stage in the annual Words in Action (WIA) production, a multilingual and multicultural student performance directed and produced by Annamaria Belleza. This year witnessed an impressive number of languages—twenty four!—take to the stage to sing, dance, and act. Students from courses in Ancient Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Cantonese, Catalan, Filipino, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Modern Greek, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Ukrainian and Vietnamese performed, in addition to the Fei Tian Chinese dance troupe. We look forward to this exciting event each year and thank the instructors who make it happen, as well as sound technician Keith Hernandez. Take a look at the BLC’s student-run Instagram for highlight reels.