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National TPRS Conference
July 8-12, 2019
Chicago, Illinois

The 2019 TPRS Conference is affectionately called a “summer camp for teachers,” but it’s much more than that! Get together with other like-minded, second-language teachers from around the world looking to take their students’ language abilities to the next level! Experiencing TPRS is an unparalleled professional development opportunity that directly influences and enhances what teachers do in their classrooms.

Visit the conference website at https://tprsbooks.wpengine.com/2019-ntprs-chicago/#1547854455867-7b40f709-fab2

The California Language Teachers’ Association and the California World Language Project present their 30th Annual Summer Seminar for Language Teachers on July 19 through 24, 2019, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The theme is "The New World Languages Standards: Pathway to Global California 2030." 

Learn more about this seminar at https://clta.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/SS-Brochure-2019-FINAL-4-3-19-3-1.pdf

From https://www.chronicle.com/article/Visa-Woes-PoliticsFears/246398

Visa Woes, Politics, and Fears of Violence Are Keeping International Students Away, Report Warns
By Steven Johnson
May 29, 2019

An international-education group is warning that “harmful policies and anti-immigrant rhetoric” are keeping international students from enrolling at American colleges, hurting the economy.

“Prospective international students and their families are concerned about U.S. federal policies and rhetoric on immigration, along with apprehensions of personal safety and tense race relations,” says the report, released on Wednesday by Nafsa: Association of International Educators.

The top reason colleges have cited for declining international-student enrollment is the visa-application process, including delays and denials, according to survey data cited by Nafsa and originally released in November by the Institute of International Education. Eighty-three percent of institutions reported it was a deterrent, a 49-percentage-point increase from 2016, when 34 percent of colleges reported such problems.

Read the full article at https://www.chronicle.com/article/Visa-Woes-PoliticsFears/246398

From https://acadeafic.org/

The Acadeafic website is a place for researchers to post blogs and vlogs about researcher in sign language and Deaf studies. 

Learn more about submitting to Acadeafic at https://acadeafic.org/how/
Explore the content at Acadeafic at https://acadeafic.org/

In its latest TEQ video, Asia Society presents Chinese language teacher Jianing Guo’s first-grade Chinese class at the Global Village Academy-Northglenn in Colorado. This video, "Let’s Dress Xiao Hua", is an instructional activity to help students to practice the words about clothes and express their personal opinions on a doll’s clothes. From this lesson, the Chinese language teacher has demonstrated that age-appropriate strategies are the key for integrating language learning into classroom interaction for children.

Watch the video at https://asiasociety.org/china-learning-initiatives/jianing-guos-first-grade-immersion-class-lets-dress-xiao-hua
Browse more TEQ videos at https://asiasociety.org/china-learning-initiatives/teq-instructional-videos-chinese-language-teaching

From https://www.jfny.org/event/the-life-of-animals-in-japanese-art/

The Life of Animals in Japanese Art
June 2 through August 18, 2019
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Animals are abundant in Japanese art history, demonstrating the significance of both real and mythical creatures in Japanese culture. Of unprecedented scale and comprehensiveness, this exhibition brings together over 300 animal-related works of art, carefully selected from significant collections in Japan and the United States, from 5th-century haniwa to contemporary art. It examines the many roles animals have played in secular, spiritual, and religious lives in Japan through diverse media such as painting, sculpture, lacquerware, ceramics, metalwork, cloisonné enamel, woodblock prints, textiles, and photography. These depictions of animals, at times simple and humorous and at other times mysterious, communicate charming aspects of Japanese culture to people of all ages.

This exhibition is organized by The Japan Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with special support of the Tokyo National Museum, the Chiba City Museum of Art, and the Suntory Museum of Art. This exhibition is part of Japan 2019, a series of events highlighting Japanese arts and culture in the U.S. throughout 2019.

Learn more about the exhibition at https://www.jfny.org/event/the-life-of-animals-in-japanese-art/

Here is an interview with Linda Kaiser, who works for an etiquette consulting firm, along with a photo gallery of common conventions in Germany: https://www.dw.com/en/how-to-handle-german-directness-an-experts-guide-to-mastering-manners/a-47967311

Of course, explicit guides to how to behave in a target culture can actually backfire in terms of growing learners' intercultural skills. For a few models of how to use guidelines as a prompt for learner reflection, see these past InterCom Activities of the Week:

https://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/26394
https://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/26355

From https://eidolon.pub/introducing-a-new-initiative-eidolon-in-the-classroom-fe68f29c9337

Eidolon is an online journal for scholarly writing about Classics that isn’t formal scholarship. As Donna Zuckerberg writes, "I suspect that the reason why our articles work so well in undergraduate classrooms is that we follow a simple truism for how to write good public scholarship: assume that your reader is a very smart person who doesn’t know much about your field. You don’t need to dumb your work down at all; you just need to provide enough background so that non-specialists can follow along, and you need to hold their interest. The result, of course, is that we’re often encouraging our writers to write articles specifically geared toward an audience of undergraduates who are bright and thoughtful but lack a broad base of knowledge about ancient Greece and Rome and classical scholarship."

A new initiative from Eidolon is the creation of Eidolon course packets. Zuckerberg writes, "Eidolon packets will include a selection of our articles carefully curated in order to generate productive class discussion. We’ve already created preliminary versions of two course packets, one aimed at Greek Civilization courses and one for Roman Civilization courses, and we’re working on developing more."

Learn more about the new initiative and how you can be involved in a pilot run of the packets at https://eidolon.pub/introducing-a-new-initiative-eidolon-in-the-classroom-fe68f29c9337

From https://frenchflicks.com

French Flicks has created a guide to French TV shows and stand-up that is available to stream on Netflix, available here: https://frenchflicks.com/read-49/items/watch-french-tv-show-on-netflix-2019.html

French Flicks has also listed all French films on Netflix in one place, here: https://frenchflicks.com/read-49/items/watch-french-films-on-netflix-2019.html