…so said the English-L1 instructor of French. This woman teaches in Canada to Anglophone Canadian students. My mind flashed to questions of language and power. Canada is an officially bilingual country, thanks to the political (linguistic?) activity of Québec. Why “Continental French” when one’s fellow countrypeople speak a different variety? I fear that the answers [...]

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

The debate rages on, no?

I just had (yet again) a provocative and insightful discussion with a professor about some data I want to analyze. This data comes from an elementary school which has a Spanish “Enrichment” program. This program distinguishes itself from a “bilingual” or a “foreign language” program in that its administrators hope that students acquire an awareness [...]

My second semester as a GSI has begun – and so has my learning of a new language. I teach French daily, my most energizing and, possibly,  most powerful part of the day, and, three times a week, I go directly to a class in Catalan. As I cross the heart of campus, I can [...]

We’re now envisioning the end of the fall semester, my first as a graduate student at Berkeley. After ten years as a junior high teacher of “core curriculum,” I received an appointment to teach French 1 upon returning to Berkeley. I wrote the following journal entry three days before instruction began in August:

le 24 août [...]