Found in Translation

a Word Assocation Questionnaire

I’m cross-posting this announcement made to LinguistList a few days ago, thinking these questions and words might spark some thought and discussion in our own circles here too. Anyone who’d like to participate can cut-and-paste the questions and email their responses directly to the researcher (email address below)

Good luck, Nina!

Dear all, My [...]

Is Foreign Language Education for Enrichment Only?

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 [...]

Threats to International Education and Faculty Governance at UC

How ironic that during International Education week, the news should arrive that the Berkeley Divisional Council voted to eliminate the Academic Senate Committee on International Education. How ironic that Berkeley should now be the only UC campus other than Merced and San Francisco not to have a Committee on International [...]

Whose university?

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 [...]

On the passing of Dell Hymes

No doubt scholars and students far and wide are mourning the passing on November 13 of Dell Hymes, one of the most influential thinkers in folklore studies, linguistic anthropology, and other fields. The University of Virginia published this article yesterday on the news of his death; one of the undoubtedly many [...]

At what price “free speech”?

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

The Tourist is God

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 [...]

Top 10 list of reasons NOT to study abroad

Dunja Nedic, an Australian exchange student at the University of Arizona, has written what must be the definitive Top 10 list of reasons why you should NOT, under any conditions, think about studying abroad. Among my favorites:

2. A disproportionate number of people will think your voice is sexy, regardless of whether this is [...]

Marathi: The Indian “national language”?

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 [...]

Berkeley to Yale: A week at a distance

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. [...]