Past Events

Nov 7, 2022: Dr. Claudia Holguín Mendoza

October 24, 2022
From Research on Sociocultural Linguistics to Critical Literacy for Language Education Dr. Claudia Holguín Mendoza Associate Professor, Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside

In this presentation, Dr. Holguín Mendoza describes the design and implementation of a comprehensive Critical Sociocultural Linguistics Literacy curriculum that deconstructs and questions sociopolitical hierarchies, challenges the subordination of heritage language students’ linguistic practices, and elevates...

Feb 15, 2023: Aurora Tsai

February 1, 2023
Mixed-heritage Individuals: Rewriting Narratives of Racial, Linguistic and Cultural Deficiency Aurora Tsai Project Assistant Professor, Center for Global Communication Strategies, University of Tokyo

Mixed-heritage individuals often have difficulty forming a positive sense of racial and cultural identity due to monoracial and raciolinguistic ideologies–beliefs that it is natural to categorize people into distinct categories of race (Harris, 2016) and conscious or unconscious...

Mar 9, 2023: Alastair Pennycook

February 24, 2023
Language as Assemblage Alastair Pennycook Emeritus Professor of Language, Society, and Education, University of Technology Sydney

A focus on language(s) as assemblage reconfigures what counts as language and how social, spatial and material worlds interact. An understanding of assemblages as entangled groupings of different elements allows for an appreciation of the ways in which different trajectories of people, semiotic resources and objects meet at particular moments and places. Drawing on a...

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...

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...

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...

Oct 21, 2022: Jonathan Rosa

October 7, 2022
Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics Jonathan Rosa Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University

Conceptualizations of competence, which permeate applied linguistics, systematically fail to account for the role of racialization in language learning. Building on collaborative work with Nelson Flores to conceptualize the framework of raciolinguistic ideologies as a project of undoing appropriateness, this presentation seeks to...

Jan 30, 2023: Filmic Language Workshop

January 16, 2023
The Grammar of Film: A Primer for World Language Teachers Mark Kaiser Retired BLC Associate Director Maya Smith Lecturer, Department of French

Designed for language instructors who would like to have a better understanding of the visual language of film in order to enrich classroom discussions on films they teach, this workshop will examine how a diverse set of filmic elements work together...

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...