Identity Archive

Results in BLC Posts

Colloquium on the Multilingual Native Language Teacher, February 28, 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…

BLC Travel Grant Report

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…

Lecture by Barbara Johnstone, 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…

Are You Another Person When You Speak Another Language?

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,…

Lecture by Crispin Thurlow, 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

ESL Teachers/ESL Students: Looking at Autoethnography through the Lens of Personetics

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...

Studying Fictional Representations of History in the L2 Classroom

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 ...

The Cultural Identities of Foreign Language Teachers

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 ...

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