Results in BLC Posts
Posted by Orlando Garcia on March 1, 2014
The Legitimacy Gap: Multilingual native language teachers in monolingual foreign language departments Foreign-born language instructors who teach their native language in the U.S. face the difficult task of mediating between two worlds that often seem historically, socially and culturally incompatible. While they are expected to represent the stereotypical native speaker and to make their students…
Posted by Victoria Williams on May 13, 2013
A few weeks ago, I attended my first-ever African Language Teachers Association (ALTA) conference in Chicago. In my past profession as a journalist, I had attended numerous conferences, but mostly as a speaker, trainer, or chair of a panel. But I went to the ALTA conference mostly as a student, which made it one of…
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 Mark Kaiser on September 23, 2011
Identifying with Language by Barbara Johnstone, Professor of English and Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon University. For the last decade or two, identity has been a hot topic throughout linguistics. Sociolinguists use the concept of identity to help explain why particular styles of speech get taken up in particular speech communities, and how and why people shift…
Posted by Victoria Williams on June 3, 2011
Dear Graduating Class, Dear Parents, Relatives, and Friends: On this day of celebration, many of you will be celebrating and talking about this graduation in many different languages. You will be dreaming of it in Spanish, raving about it in Korean, and in the years to come, who knows? You might remember it in German,…
Posted by Orlando Garcia on November 13, 2009
Language, Tourism, and Banal Globalization by Crispin Thurlow, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Washington Described as the “one of the greatest population movements of all time,” tourism is firmly established as the world’s single largest international trade. And it’s not just people who are on tour; language too is on the move. In this…
Results in L2 Journal Articles
Park, Gloria
Volume 05 Issue 1
In this paper, I highlight four distinct but interconnected areas of my life history that I refer to as autobiographic poetic waves. These waves are layered with the complex underpinning of racial, linguistic, gendered, classed, and professional identity politics...
Lapidus, Alec, Yalda M. Kaveh, & Mamiko Hirano
Volume 05 Issue 1
This qualitative, naturalistic study examines thoughts expressed in autoethnographies and accompanying notes written by ESL teachers/learners who are enrolled in a graduate teacher education program in the US. These data are then juxtaposed with the Freirean idea that English learners can be empowered if they analyze their personal paths critically...
Tegmark, Mats
Volume 04 Issue 1
The article addresses the didactic questions of what, why and how aspects of culture and history can be—and should be, it is argued—an integral part of all foreign and second language teaching and learning. In particular, it is argued that the study of literary fiction within tertiary foreign language education can function as a gateway ...
Fichtner, Friederike & Katie Chapman
Volume 03 Issue 1
Foreign language teachers are often migrants. They have traveled and lived in other countries either to learn or to teach a language. In 2005, Domna Stanton characterized language teaching as a cosmopolitan act-- “a complex encounter made in a sympathetic effort to see the world as [others] see it and, as a consequence, to denaturalize our own views” (629). Do foreign language teachers ...