As I write this post there are hundreds of Berkeley students and community members surrounding barricades and police tape (”POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS”) around Wheeler Hall, the site of a student ‘occupation’ (see updates here too) after the UC Regents’ passage of a budget including an unprecedented [...]

Reading a provocative post entitled The Abortion Amendment by fellow FITizen Prof. Robin Lakoff on the newly started Berkeley Blog, I was reminded of an event that rattled me a few weeks ago on campus. Berkeley Students for Life (BSL) apparently invited the more→

On Friday, November 13, Crispin Thurlow gave a talk at the Berkeley Language Center entitled Language, Tourism, and Banal Globalization, in which he “examine[d] some of the ways that language is commonly taken up in tourism’s search for difference, exoticity, and authenticity.” Using a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, Thurlow discussed [...]

The newly constituted Maharashtra Assembly in India was the site of an eventful brawl when Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) workers prevented Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Azmi from taking his oath of office in Hindi: as soon as he began taking the oath, the workers snatched his mike and attempted to shred the [...]

With last Monday’s BLC lecture by University of Oregon’s Carl Falsgraf, “Distance Teaching and Distance Learning”, and a few days at end of the week at the joint NEALLT/NERALLT conference at Yale on language learning and technology, I’ve had a lot of stimulation for thinking about distance and online language learning. [...]

One reason I’ve decided to research language use and identity for my dissertation is because I find that my own identity is constantly in question, both by myself and by others. As an American living in the United States, my linguistic identity should be simple. I should only speak one language, English, and be indifferent [...]

In his 2001 book, Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice, Ron Scollon began an exposition of discourse as action in the same way he began numerous presentations and, no doubt, other conversations with scholars, students and friends: with a cup of coffee. But this was no un-ordinary cup of coffee; he discussed what was, in [...]

I don’t know when I started hearing this, but nowadays I can’t help but cringe every time I hear expressions like these:

Watching the weather forecast on the evening news: “Your weekend weather coming up, right after these commercials.”
Transferring from the Fremont to the San Francisco-bound train on BART: “This is your San Francisco/Daly City-bound train.”
At [...]

Last night I had the privilege of joining Usree for a visit to a language-learning event and screening of Najib Joe Hakim’s film that chronicles the successes of children in bilingual programs in San Francisco schools, Speaking in Tongues.

Held at Beverly Cleary Hall across the street from the Unit 3 residence hall, and [...]

Learning a new language at 41 is a humbling experience . . . I struggle to catch the rhythm and grammatical structures, skills that I took for granted while studying in China 20 years ago.   Now I have an intimate understanding of losing “linguistic plasticity,” and I’m jealous of my younger self who merrily writes [...]

President Obama made some surprising comments today about the blogosphere during an interview with the editors of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade:

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up [...]

September 24 marks the date of the UC walkout to protest the State’s fiscal crisis and it’s subsequent impact on UC Faculty, Staff, and Students. In theory I am in support of walk outs because of my passion for social change.  However, my questions about this particular walk out are many. To begin with, how [...]

Seriously. And you, too, blogged before blogs, if Uve ripped (remember when paper was real?), cut (and scissors?) and pasted (glue?), mixed (batter) and burned (have DVD drives eliminated your inner pyromaniac, too?).

Sure, metaphors for all the cool stuff we can do with digital tools to images, sounds, videos and the like always seem to [...]

Last week, on the same day, I got emails from both my brother and a Linguistic Landscape research group discussion list, with links to the same article on the BBC News’ site. I knew this thing must be going around the internet…how often do multilingual signs make the news?

The featured article was actually a slideshow [...]

Since we live in a hurry-up culture, it’s not surprising that we like to find ways to speed up communication – or at least appear to be doing so. But linguistic shortcuts are not an altogether new thing. Some have been around for centuries (at least.), though one seems to me to be, if not [...]

This evening, Sunehri Market, the local bazaar, was awash in green, white, and deep saffron, the colors of the Indian flag. There were tricolor kites, delicate (miniature) paper flags, exercise wristbands, streamers, paper caps, garlands, towelettes, artificial flower bouquets, and cloth flags. Tomorrow is Independence Day, the 62nd anniversary of Indian freedom from [...]

Over the last two months, protests have been breaking out in Iran over the “election” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President. The dissenters comprise of supporters of the candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who are convinced that the election has been stolen from them. I have been following the [...]

Back in Paris again, I had the opportunity recently to meet with French teachers and researchers of English, German and French as a foreign language. They couldn’t wait to leave on vacation and were venting their frustrations that the “bac” or high school graduating examination lets 80-85% of students through these days and thus lowers [...]

Recently I have encountered several analyses of Sarah Palin’s speeches as “found” poetry. One example comes from a wonderful piece by John Lundberg in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/sarah-palin-the-anti-poet_b_237935.html):

Look at how she turns a simple statement into a mind-numbing puzzle (this is from Hart Seely’s terrific collection of found poems taken from actual Sarah Palin [...]

It’s funny how translation can bring to light meanings in familiar words that you never knew were there. The last few days, I’ve been working on a document in Japanese—or, I guess “document” might be too formal a term. It’s an advertisement for a thermal blanket with different layers that are supposed to retain the [...]