President’s message, Fall 2017
Dear FLANC Members,
Happy school year to everyone in the language teaching community! I hope you had a terrific summer. I am excited to welcome our FLANC members as we start this new year and certain that you are all re-energized to continue working on making linguistic diversity more visible, valued, and vibrant than ever.
Please, allow me to start with a big and heartfelt “Thank you!” to all language educators, exhibitors, and presenters who participated in our language conference last fall. You made it a huge success! It is always invigorating to witness the commitment and passion for languages in our region and a source of great pride to know that we join forces in advocating for inspiring language learners to embrace one very important goal: Empowering our community through the promotion and support of multilingual identities.
With this idea in mind, and just as we do every summer, the FLANC Board had a meeting in June and another one in August in order to finalize details related to our upcoming Fall 2017 FLANC Conference at Chabot College on October 21st. As usual, our language conference will offer a rich program with presentations that integrate theoretical knowledge with practical examples. Assessment, Inter-Language Diversity, and Visual Thinking Strategies are only some of the topics.
Technology through digital tools that strengthen meaningful learning while motivating students will be strongly represented with a variety of innovative activities that can be easily implemented in the language classroom.
Always interested in building and maintaining solid ties with our affiliate organizations as well as with our colleagues, last year, our FLANC conference was honored with the collaboration of NCJTA through a set of presentations organized by Dr. Masahiko Minami, Professor of Japanese at the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at San Francisco State University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Japanese Linguistics. This year, we are just as excited and honored to have the participation of CLTAC and the Chinese teaching community as they join FLANC offering their Fall Workshops at Chabot College this October 21st. During the past few weeks, I have been in contact with Professor Le Tang, CLTAC Vice President and faculty at the Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University, as we work on the final details for the workshops and conference.
I had the pleasure to meet Vice President Le Tang at this past spring Mandarin Speech Contest held at Lowell High School, in San Francisco. This was my first time attending such a wonderful event, and I am deeply grateful for President Liwei Gao’s invitation. I would like to express my gratitude to the CLTAC Executive Board as well as to my colleagues in the Chinese teaching community for their cordiality and kindness, as everyone at CLTAC made sure I felt at home while enjoying the events. I was amazed by the number of students participating (almost 600!) and captivated by the many cultural performances presented. Please, see the picture with my colleagues Frederik Green, Wendy Tu, and Christina Yee.
Always with our members in mind, our FLANC Fall Conference at Chabot College is organized around a diversity of languages and teaching pedagogies. . . I hope you join us this October!
Looking forward to meeting you at our conference,
Sandra García Sanborn