Please join me in congratulating our colleagues on the following achievements:
Joseph A. Villarama presented “Filipino Language Kickoff: From the Rice Bowl to the Tree Town; Ways to Teach Language through Culture” at the Fulbright FLTA Mid-Year Conference, January 27-29, 2022. Joseph’s talk delved into how, following his own journey from the “Rice Bowl” (Nueva Ecija), his Filipino language classes have carved out a niche in the “Tree Town” (Ann Arbor) in the hopes that this experience could serve as roadmap towards understanding culture and language. Following Kuo and Lai’s (2006) observation that “language and culture are intertwined and one will affect the other as they have this kind of deep and symbolic relationship,” he also highlighted some ways to teach and learn a foreign/second language through culture and/or to teach and share culture through language learning.
This conference was attended by nearly 400 Fulbright FLTAs representing different countries and languages, members of the US Department of State including the Deputy Assistant Secretary Ethan Rosenzweig, Fulbright and IIE staff, and members of the public.
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