Last Friday, as several Berkeley folks were busy discussing innovations in language and literacy education at AERA in Vancouver, and others were re-visioning the present and future of multilingual subjects and societies at the Multilingual, 2.0? symposium in Tucscon, I had these topics in mind as I joined dozens of [...]

While transporting my high school son to debate tournaments at various Bay-area high schools, I have found myself parked in high school libraries for hours at end, waiting my turn to judge one of the many events. It is striking the difference one finds between libraries in top-ranked high schools (e.g. Lowell [...]

I’m working on a project right now for the Berkeley Language Center called “Languages at Berkeley”. It’s an effort to put a comprehensive list of the languages that are being taught at UC Berkeley on one page, and to link from that page to introductions to each language. The basic idea is to give visitors [...]

The Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley invites you to take a class in an African language this Fall 2010 semester, including:

Elementary Zulu
Elementary Chichewa
Elementary Wolof
Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced Swahili

Class times, Course Control Numbers, and more information is available on this PDF file. Contact Amma Oduro (amma AT berkeley DOT edu) [...]

A young friend of mine is seeking advice:

If a child attends a preschool at 3 and 4 years old where he is exposed to another language but not actively taught it and his native language is used as well, how much outside work will he need to be fluent in the foreign language by kindergarten? [...]

I’m at the joint NEALLT/NERALLT conference being held at Yale October 30-31, and hope to post a few more updates on language learning and technology topics. For now I thought I’d share a neat link to language learning applications for smartphones (for all you iPhone owners out there!), put together by [...]

I just added info about the Kiswahili/Swahili language table meeting every Thursday at 1pm in the Bear’s Lear to the FIT calendar. This table is open to anyone who’d like to learn or practice their language skills, and you can contact The Center for African Studies (510-642-8338) if you’re interested.

So far [...]

여러분, 안녕하세요? (Hi, everyone!)

I’m writing this post for anyone on this blog, Found in Translation, but want to give a special shout-out to the summer language classes at Cal. And since I’m in Korea right now, and since I started studying Korean many years ago in a K1 summer language class at Berkeley (now I’m [...]

TechCrunch reported yesterday that there was a language startup website that was among the winners in the European startup conference in Brussels, Plugg. Apparently the site Myngle, which connects individual teachers with people who want to learn languges on their own schedule (for a fee), got rave reviews. Other [...]

It’s a few months old, but this list on TechCrunch has tons of links.

It’s interesting that the author says that the biggest chunk of Web 2.0 education sites are for language learning….where exactly is the $20 billion “second language acquisition market”?

Any favorite Web 2 sites? I’m going to check out the Italian right [...]

While I was wading through the myriad book exhibits at the carnivalesque MLA conference in San Francisco (7000+ people here, they say), I happened across the very cool-looking Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations published in 2000 by the New York University Press, edited by Marc [...]

TechCrunch ran a story yesterday about the Massachusetts-based startup Yamli, saying that they’re solidifying their position as a major player in the Arabic search world. (I posted previously on them here).

Apparently what they’ve done now is to allow for an automatic search for phonetically similar words with different spellings…Any [...]

Forwarding from the Berkeley Language Center: Everyone’s welcome to come to the Fall 2008 BLC Fellows Instructional Development Research Project presentations:

Translingual/Transcultural competence: an operational approach to the MLA report, by Désirée Pries, Lecturer, French
Crossing the Bridge: Shifting Perspectives on and in First-Year Turkish Through Film, by Jason Vivrette, GSR, Comparative Literature
Filmmaking and Foreign [...]