Kimberly Vinall is the Executive Director of the Berkeley Language Center (BLC). Dr. Vinall received her PhD in Education at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 and her MA in Hispanic Literature at the University of Arizona in 1995. Prior to assuming her current position, Dr. Vinall was a Spanish language program coordinator at the University of Michigan and a tenured faculty of Spanish at De Anza College. Informing her work in the BLC are her almost 20 years of teaching language, culture, and literature; her experience developing curricular materials for beginning, intermediate, and advanced language levels at the university and community college levels; and her almost 15 years of experience as a language program director, including the training of world languages instructors.
Dr. Vinall’s research in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and pedagogy includes the areas of intercultural education, textbook analysis, critical pedagogy, and uses of literary texts and digital tools in the world languages curriculum. Her current research, with Dr. Emily Hellmich, is a multi-phase project that has documented instructors’ beliefs and attitudes towards machine translation (MT) and learner uses of MT tools with the goal of exploring the critical potentials of these technologies to support world languages instruction and the development of digital literacies. The current phase of this collaborative project is being supported by a 2023-2025 US Department of Education International Research Studies Grant.
She has published articles in the Foreign Language Annals; Language Learning & Technology; Second Language Research and Practice; and Language, Curriculum, and Culture, and chapters, most recently in the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. She was also a co-guest editor of a special issue of the L2 Journal titled Machine Translation and Language Education: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice. Her current publication co-authored with Dr. Hellmich and titled Student use and instructor beliefs: Machine translation in language education won the Language Learning & Technology Dorothy Chun Best Journal Article.
Select Publications
- Vinall, K., Wen, W., & Hellmich, E. A. (2023). Investigating L2 writers' uses of machine translation and other online tools. Foreign Language Annals, 57 (2). 499-526.
- Hellmich, E. A., & Vinall, K. (2023). Student use and instructor beliefs: Machine translation in language education. Language Learning & Technology 27 (1), 1-27.
- Vinall, K. (2023). Practicing solidarity in a critical community service-learning project. In K. F. Davidson, S. M. Johnson, & L. J. Randolph (Eds.), How we take action: Social justice in K-16 language classrooms (pp. 321-334). Information Age Publishing.
- Vinall, K., & Hellmich, E. A. (2022). Do you speak translate?: Reflections on the nature and role of translation. L2 Journal, 14 (1), 4-25.
- Vinall, K., & Hellmich, E.A. (2021). Down the rabbit hole: Machine translation, metaphor, and instructor identity / agency. Second Language Research & Practice, 2(1), 99–118.
- Hellmich, E.A. & Vinall, K. (2021). FL instructor beliefs about machine translation: ecological insights to guide research and practice. International Journal of Computer Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, 11(4), 1-18.
- Vinall, K. & Shin, J. (2018). The construction of the tourist gaze in English textbooks in South Korea: Exploring the tensions between internationalization and nationalization. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 31 (2), 1-18.
- Vinall, K. (2016). "Got Llorona?": Teaching for the development of symbolic competence. L2 Journal, 8 (1), 10-16.
- Kramsch, C., & Vinall, K. (2015). The cultural politics of language textbooks in the era of globalization. In X. L. Curdt-Christiansen & C. Weninger (Eds.), Language, ideology and education: The politics of textbooks in language education (pp. 11-28). Routledge.
- Vinall, K. (2012). ¿Un legado histórico?: Symbolic competence and the construction of multiple histories. L2 Journal, 4, 102-123.
- Barrette, C., Paesani, K., & Vinall, K. (2010). Toward an integrated curriculum: Maximizing the use of target language literature. Foreign Language Annals, 43 (2), 216-230.
