Last Friday, December 18, the CLS was proud to host a symposium in honor of the countless and extraordinary contributions made to language study at Yale University by Joe Gordon, Deputy Dean of Yale College and Dean of Undergraduate Education.…
On Thursday afternoon, October 29, the language community at Yale was treated to a provocative lecture by Carl Blyth on the underpinnings and applications of a pedagogy of languaculture in the L2 classroom. Blyth, Associate Professor of French at the University…
On Tuesday, October 27, the CLS will host its second 10-minute Tech Talks of the year, at a fantastic time for reflecting on how and why technology can be used for language teaching and learning: Tuesday is the second day…
What is action research, why do it, and how is it done? These three questions were the focus of last Thursday’s (October 8) Brown Bag at the CLS, where language faculty, graduate students, and staff gathered to discuss the definitions,…
Yesterday Per Urlaub, of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, visited the CLS for a special talk on curricular change in university foreign language departments. Entitled “From Communicative Competence to Critical Literacy: Genre, Proficiency Levels, Strategies,” the…
Last Tuesday through Friday, the CLS hosted an intensive Pedagogy Workshop aimed at helping new language instructors at Yale prepare for their first semesters of teaching. Over 35 graduate students and Fulbright Language Teaching Assistants gathered for group sessions on…
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…
On February 18 and 19 the CLS hosted two days of informal lunchtime talks by Yale language faculty on technologies they use in their teaching. The first day featured Sybil Alexandrov (Spanish), Shiri Goren (Hebrew), and Ninghui Liang (Chinese) giving…
On February 26, the CLS Thursday Brown Bag series received a special guest in Mirjam Hauck, member of the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University, and for the current term with SUNY’s Center for Collaborative Online International Learning.…
“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…
On Friday, February 6, the CLS welcomed Stéphane Charitos, Director of Columbia University’s Language Resource Center, and Andrew Ross, Head of Learning Support Services at Arizona State University’s School of International Letters & Cultures, for a presentation on an exciting initiaitve in community-based…
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…
Last Wednesday we had our first sesison of 10-minute Tech Talks, with 20 people present to talk about what technologies they were most excited about or challenged by in 2014, and what they’re looking forward to in 2015. This 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!…
At last Thursday’s Brown Bag, we talked about engaging with art as a way to expand students’ repertoire. We noted that students gain confidence when speaking about art in a public space, they gain a richer sense of the target…
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…
As we did last year, Yale language faculty and CLS staff paid a visit to the Yale University Art Gallery this past week, for a special Brown Bag on using art in language teaching. After a general orientation, participants headed…
By many measures of variety, the first session of our 10-minute Tech Talks for Fall ’14 was a great success: it brought together lectors and graduate students, faculty from Yale and beyond, and presenters from 6 time zones apart for…
WELCOME BACK! This summer I once again participated in the Heritage Language Teacher Workshop at UCLA. One of the very enthusiastic mentors was keen on having a series of icebreaker activities that, whether one liked them or not, got the…
[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:…
From May 12-15, the CLS hosted a symposium and workshop exploring concepts and developing practices to support the Yale-Columbia-Cornell Shared Course Initiative. The May 12 symposium, entitled “The SCI in Context: New Directions in Distance Education” and held in Yale’s…
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…
Blogging for second language learning has been a topic of discussion for over 10 years. Just as we discussed in our April 3 Brown Bag on blogging in the L2 classroom (and reviewed in Bob Godwin-Jones’ May 2003 Emerging Technologies…
We held our first Language Fair for students to showcase the wealth of language courses taught at Yale and to show students what can be done with foreign language skills. All language departments participated in the fair and it was…
On Wednesday, March 5, 2014, we had our third Ten-minute Tech Talk event of the Spring 2014 semester, which was attended by 16 people. Elka Kristonagy from the English Language Program opened the meeting with VoiceThread, a web-based application that…
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…