Past Events

Nov 3, 2023: Janice McGregor

October 20, 2023
Toward Justice in Study Abroad, Intercultural Learning, and Language Education Janice McGregor Assistant Professor of German Studies and SLAT , University of Arizona

Study abroad (SA) is a fixture in post-secondary language education in the United States. In this talk, I introduce two different–yet entwined–facets of SA and language learning that can cause harm. The first is the common ideological construction of SA as “L2-land”, or the primary context where “authentic” language “use” occurs (and relatedly, the acquisition of “near-native” language...

Events Archive

2022-2023 Sept

FORUM: BLC Summer Film Fellows: Film in the Language / Culture Curriculum
Karen Llagas, Minsook Kim, Amir Effat, Cristina Farronato, Giuliana Perco, Nataliia Goshylyk, Nora Melnikova

Oct

TALK:Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics
Jonathan Rosa

Nov

PANEL: The Berkeley Language Center - Taking stock: Remembering the Past and Envisioning the Future
Claire Kramsch, David Szanton, Alan Timberlake, Richard Kern, Mark Kaiser, Kimberly Vinall, Emily...

March 15, 2024: Simon Coffey

March 1, 2024
Sparking the imagination: Creative connectivity and emotional investment in language learning Dr Simon Coffey King’s College London

There has been an extraordinary rise of interest in the use of ‘emotion’ and ‘creativity’ as leitmotivs in language learning research and teaching. I begin this talk by briefly reviewing some developments of these terms in language education scholarship (including two recent special issues I jointly guest-edited), before then presenting some approaches I have...

Dec 1, 2023: Fall BLC Fellows Forum

December 1, 2023
Instructional Development Research Projects Building Classes in Languages for Professional Purposes: Opportunities, Challenges, and Best Practices Claire Tourmen Lecturer, Department of French

The UC Berkeley French Department has recently launched an innovative project, aiming at developing professional paths for students through French for Professions classes, local and international internships, and partnerships. Yet, strategic and practical questions remain: Will this project help us recruit students? How can we integrate it...

Sept 12, 2023: Summer Film Fellows Roundtable

September 1, 2023
BLC Roundtable: Film in the Language / Culture Curriculum Ambika Athreya (German)
Myrna Douzjian (Armenian)
Nathalie Khankan (Arabic)
David Kyeu (Swahili)
Natalya Nielsen (Swedish)
Oksana Willis (Russian)

Led by Mark Kaiser (BLC Associate Director Emeritus) and Maya Sidhu (Continuing Lecturer, French Department), the Summer Film Fellows took place this past summer, during which...

Oct 12 & 13, 2023: Joel Walsh

October 2, 2023
Responding to the “Arrival”: Essential Background Information and Strategies for Language Instructors in the Age of Human-Like Language Technologies (Machine Translation and Large Language Models) Dr. Joel Walsh Software Engineer, Privateer Space

Machine translation (MT) systems were once clunky and error-prone but have improved greatly in the last decade. Within the last two years, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have achieved state of the art performance at translation and multilingual text generation. The...

Feb 2, 2024: Glynda Hull & Catherine Park

January 19, 2024
Towards a Pedagogy of Transculturality Glynda Hull Professor, Berkeley School of Education Catherine Park Doctoral Candidate, Berkeley School of Education

In our interconnected world, our students experience and traverse digital and physical moments of cultural contacts in more numerous and complex manners than ever before. Such experiences have prompted us to revisit, with lessons learnt from our students, the powerful framework that has underpinned much...

Feb 23, 2024: Judit Kormos

February 9, 2024
Supporting Language Learning for Neurodiverse Students in Classroom Settings Judit Kormos Professor Judit Kormos, Lancaster University, Department of Linguistics and English Language

The concept of neurodiversity views individual variability along cognitive and neurological dimensions as integral to how people experience and interact with the world around them. Neurodiverse language learners can face several challenges in instructed language learning and assessment contexts, most of which could be...