The department hosted four events in our Student-Faculty Forum series, in which faculty and graduate students share their current research and gather to think together on issues related to teaching. Our research events this year were: Language attitudes and new speakers in Brittany, France (Sept. 22, 2023) featuring two PhD students from French Linguistics: Clara Miller-Broomfield, “Breizh unanet? Breton language activists’ perceptions of the Gallo language” and Jennifer Cox, “Perceptions of authenticity and attitudes toward neologisms among new speakers of Breton”; Is it a myth? Is it a game? Interactivity and Narrativity in Video Game Adaptation (Feb. 23, 2024), a talk from Audrey Halley (PhD student in French/Francophone Studies) in preparation for her presentation at the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Montréal in March; and Enriching the French Language: Expressing Science and Technology in French (March 22, 2024). This last event featured our departmental visiting scholar Benjamin Fagard (Senior Researcher, CNRS) and colleagues Etienne Quillot and Valerio Emanuele from the Ministère de la Culture on their collaborative efforts in the Dispositif d’enrichissement de la langue française to resist borrowed words from other languages in the realm of science and technology, and to provide French speakers instead with ‘well-formed’ equivalents in French. Our teaching roundtable this year was Artificial Intelligence and Foreign Language Teaching (Jan. 19, 2024), organized by Lucia Casiraghi (PhD student in Italian Studies), and inspired by recent research in digital tools in foreign language education as well as by a test she conducted with an AI-based app called HeyGen that can translate videos into different languages, reproducing the original voice and adapting mouth movements to make the output look and sound more authentic.

-Liz Hebbard