On Friday I had the pleasure of joining many friends and colleagues at UC Berkeley for the first and last sessions of a one-day colloquium organized by Claire Kramsch and Lihua Zhang, entitled “The legitimacy gap: Multilingual native language teachers in monolingual foreign language departments”. Inspired by the colloquium’s […]

At a presentation I was fortunate enough to give a little over a week ago at the BLC (“Where is the language classroom today?: Reconsidering the place/s of language learning with technology”), I opened with a comment about the stage fright I was feeling at the outset of an hour-long presentation, one which […]

I’m at the 19th Sociolinguistics Symposium, being held August 21-24 at Berlin’s Freie Universität, and wanting to report out some of the happenings here. As is the case at any conference, there are far too many sessions going on to experience or report on anything but a fraction of the totality (I […]

This past Friday and Saturday in Sutardja Dai Hall (the home of CITRIS, near North Gate), the Berkeley Center for New Media hosted a symposium, “Digital Inquiry: Forms of Knowledge in the Age of New Media”.

True to the plural form in its title, speakers gave many visions of knowledge online […]

This post from LinguistList has just announced a major celebration of Professor Robin Lakoff‘s work:

In recognition of Robin Tolmach Lakoff’s many contributions to linguistics, a day-long symposium in her honor will be held on the University of California, Berkeley, campus Friday, May 4, 2012. Robin’s former students and colleagues […]

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 […]

It’s common practice to publish blog posts after a significant event–to question, re-interpret, and basically put a new spin on what happened and what was said. For today’s BLC lecture by H. Douglas Brown, Faculty Emeritus from San Francisco State University’s M.A.-TESOL program, I thought I would give this blog format […]

As I began to write last time, waiting for my connecting flight back to California from the February 22-24 4th International Workshop on Linguistic Landscape, I had departed for this gathering in Addis Ababa with two conceptual questions and one applied question in mind. First, for the linguistic landscape workshop participants–a […]

My mind is awash with thoughts from last week’s linguistic landscape workshop in Ethiopia’s capital city—thoughts from the last two days of informal visits to the campus of Addis Ababa University, from a group excursion 300km through the countryside to the Debre Libanos Monastery and the Blue Nile Gorge, […]

For Friday’s presentation at the Berkeley Language Center’s Moving Between Languages colloquium, I was really looking forward to moving beyond the world of Powerpoint or Keynote as a way of having visual support for my talk. But it didn’t look to be easy. Heck, even in that first sentence, I couldn’t write […]

From the FIT afternoon gathering last Friday, April 1. Several people seated around a table outside started passing a piece of paper around as we talked and this is what happened. What does it all mean?

This is the first year in a while I can remember that I’m not planning to go to AAAL, the conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics that will take place this coming weekend in Chicago. And in not going, I’m perhaps more acutely aware of what I might be missing than […]

The Center for the Art of Translation and LitQuake present an event that you might expect to find on a blog called Found in Translation–a panel discussion entitled “What Should I Read in Translation?”, featuring translators Chana Kronfeld, Kareem Abu-Zeid, Alissa Valles, and Eric Selland, and moderated by Scott Esposito. To […]

The title pretty much says it all…thanks to Viola on Facebook for pointing out that today is National Punctuation Day. The website actually has a lot of useful information about how and when to use each type of punctuation, so if you want to brush up, give those semicolons and apostrophes a click!

Happy Friday!

If you have a language or cultural topic you’re curious to talk about or would like to try blogging about, or if you’d like to meet and share stories about your names in other languages and English, come to Caffe Strada anytime from 2:30 to 4, in the patio area outside.

It’d be […]

Are you a.) creative b.) artistic c.) romantic d.) disposessed e.) expressive, or f.) just plain cool? Tomorrow is Poem in Your Pocket Day!!! Here are the instructions (thanks, Billette!!):

Print/write out your favorite “pome”, tuck it into your pocket (wallet, purse, thong, etc.) with it poking out, and […]

Leaving a TESOL conference several years ago with Tom Scovel, one of my esteemed professors from the M.A. TESOL program at San Francisco State University, I remember his words of advice: write down three things you learned from this conference, and connect them with concrete steps that you intend to take in your […]

Have you been learning a language recently? Are you trying not to forget one? Do you have other thoughts or experiences about language, language learning, or language teaching that you’d like to talk about? FIT’s having a get-to-know-you meeting tomorrow (2/5) at 2pm in room 34 Dwinelle.

We’re hoping that there are others out […]

We’ve just added some language events to the Languages@Berkeley calendar (see the “Calendar” link at the top of the FIT page for a full calendar view, or scroll down and look in the right-hand column for the line-by-line summary).

Here are a few coming up:

“Lecture by Vincent Gillespie: Meat, Metaphor, and Mysticism: […]

The Berkeley Language Center’s Spring 2010 lecture series–featuring Professors Andrew Cohen (U of Minnesota), Jerrold Cooper, (Johns Hopkins U), Lera Boroditsky (Stanford), and the BLC Fellows Anna Maria Bellezza, Usree Bhattacharya, Minsook Kim, and Jason Vivrette–has been added to the Languages@Berkeley calendar. Check back with the BLC for more details, and […]