For the first time, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages held its annual convention virtually in November of 2020. As with most professional conferences this year, the convention was held virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.…
There comes a time when every instructor finds that for her/him to advance their role in the pedagogical process, they need horizons that are wider than the four walls of their classroom. Expanding horizons is of course but a metaphor…
The annual ACTFL Convention will take place in Nashville, TN, from November 17-19, and Yale will be well-represented! Below are the presenters, titles and abstracts copied from the online convention program. If you’re not traveling to Nashville for the conference this…
Community Ideas At the AATG Presidents Meeting, which I attended as AATG-CT vice-president, we learnt about three successful inter-disciplinary projects that involved students and teachers. The Maine chapter presented “Deutsche Woche in Bar Harbor”, a one week immersion project with…
The Heritage Meets Heritage project made its off-campus debut at a round-table discussion at ACTFL 2016. This project, a study of identity, motivation and inter-language relationships among heritage speakers of Greek, Korean, Russian and Spanish, has been an adventure in learning…
The time has come for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) 2016 Annual Convention and World Languages Expo, and Yale’s language teaching and research community is well represented. Below are relevant titles and abstracts copied from…
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining the LAUD Symposium, a biennial linguistics event in Landau, Germany organized by Martin Pütz and colleagues at the University of Koblenz-Landau. Following past years’ topics that included intercultural pragmatics, cognitive psycholinguistics,…
Four days of intensive training averaging about eight hours a day, took me and a dedicated group of eleven other members of language faculty here at Yale on a journey to explore the wonders of the world of the…
The motto of the conference, “Contexts and Language Learning: Situated Learning in the 21st Century” inspired quite a few contributions on ‘authentic’ situated learning in study abroad contexts that attempted to go beyond the home university instructor-led course abroad (including…
The International Language Testing Association held its annual conference – Language Testing Research Colloquium – in Toronto this year from March 18-20. The theme, ‘From language testing to language assessment’ reflects the attention that classroom-based and learner-oriented assessment has been…
Heading to another conference (AAAL in Toronto) is a strange time to be blogging about a conference from last weekend, but the Georgetown Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics was too good not to want to revisit what I learned and somehow…
“So when y’all meet, what do you speak?” As a faculty who teaches Arabic, I always hear this question from my students in their attempt to shed light on the mysteries of the many dialects of Arabic (Arabic has a Standard…
Thanks to the generous support of the CLS travel fund, I was able to participate at the annual conference of American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), held on November 21-23, 2014 in San Antonio, TX. It was…
At last year’s ACTFL conference in San Antonio, I attended several panels that concentrated on using literature at various levels in the language classroom, which was also the topic of the session in which I presented. In one session, instructors…
ASEEES Convention 2014, San Antonio, TX On November 20 – 23, 2014, I attended the 46th annual conference ASEEES in San Antonio, TX. ASEEES stands for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. It is the largest conference…
My experience at the annual conference of Middle East Studies Association (MESA) this November, 2014, can be divided into three points: 1. Literature Because I have been teaching some of the literary works of Najib Mahfouz, the noble prize winner…
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) brings together scholars, educators and all those who are interested in studies (language, literature, culture, politics, etc.) related to that area of the world from all over the world. It holds a yearly meeting in the…
I was able to attend the ACTFL convention this year, the theme of which was ‘Reaching Global Competence’. As those who have attended an ACTFL convention before will know, the number of attendees, the number of presentations and the physical…
At the beginning of October I attended the RIFLA Fall Conference, which was held in Narragansett, RI. This was a small language conference which gave me the opportunity to speak with some high school teachers about German instruction at the high school…
On Friday I was able to attend and present at the MAFLA Conference which was held in beautiful Sturbridge, MA. This conference was much larger than I expected and there were teachers from many different places. My presentation on using…
On Thursday I was able to attend the NERALLT (New England Regional Association For Language Learning Technology) Conference at Brown University. It was nice to get a chance to speak with so many colleagues interested in teaching languages with technology!…
Learner-Oriented Assessment (LOA) Teachers College Oct. 10-12, 2014. What a wonderful opportunity to be able to attend this interesting conference on Learner-Oriented Assessment here at Teachers College. The first session of papers started Friday evening and all attendees were instructed…
[updated 8-19 10:00am] [updated 8-18 9:00am] I’ve arrived and settled in at UW’s annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, from today to Thursday (Aug 12-14). I’ve come with a few hats on: at a general level, trying to glean…
May 7-11 I attended the annual CALICO conference at Ohio University in Athens, OH. CALICO is always a great conference because it brings together people who share a passion for computer-assisted language learning. This year’s conference theme was “Open, Online, Massive:…
On Thursday, March 27th, there was an Association for Teachers of Japanese (ATJ) meeting in Philadelphia, PA. This is part of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference, and it focuses solely on Japan related topics, so it was a…
Attending the 2014 Chicago Language Symposium has been a great opportunity for me especially because it made me realize how much depth there is in teaching languages in current times. In addition to the past approaches and techniques used by…
The 2nd International Heritage/Community Languages Conference held at UCLA on March 7 and 8 was a great way to start spring break. With up to 9 panels at a given time it was difficult to choose which to attend. The…
Thanks to the generous support of the Center for Language Study, I was able to attend the annual meeting of the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL 42), Leiden, the Netherlands, February 14-16, 2014. The North American Conference on…
On Friday I had the pleasure of joining many colleagues and friends 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…
On November 21 – 24 2013, I attended the annual ASEES conference in Boston. This is the largest annual conference in the field of Slavic Studies; ASEEES stands for Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies. The conference program…
I attended the ACTFL conference in Orlando, FL, on November 22-24, 2013, serving as the chair of the panel “Genre and Style in Chinese Teaching” and presenting my paper “Shumianyu (formal written Chinese) and its relevance to teaching advanced Chinese…
The 2013 Chinese Conference at ACTFL was held in Orlando. My panel was on Saturday morning, 8:00-9:00am, under the panel theme “K-12 Teaching” with two other speakers. My presentation was “To Bridge the High School and College Level Chinese Curriculums”…
Thanks to the generous support of the CLS travel fund, I was able to participate at the annual conference of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), held on November 21-24, 2013 in Boston, MA. From the website:…
As a person at the intersection of applied linguistics and instructional technology, I was very excited about attending the NERALLT Conference that took place at Saint Anselm College on October 24-25, 2013. As Dave Malinowski and I were driving through…
After this past weekend’s Language and Culture Workshop at Brown, my head is still full of thoughts about teaching culture in the language classroom, using technologies new and old. In a full day of presentations and small-group discussions, about 40…