Between professionalism and political engagement in foreign language teaching practice

In this paper, I reflect on a project conducted at University of California Berkeley with four colleagues teaching Chinese, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese who decided to engage their students in some the political controversies which native speakers these languages are engaged respective countries. These teachers highly educated, experienced speakers, they all professional non-senate members faculty. Following students’ wishes focused respectively following topics: racism against Asians US; Israeli–Palestinian conflict; immigrant refugees Italy from Muslim countries; how remember Hiroshima. Given low level language proficiency classes, teachers’ common practice was elicit capitalize emotional involvement. However, while learners emotionally into seeing conflicts speakers’ perspective, were hampered by very delving complex meanings events discussed. reasons for seeming lack translingual activism what it means foreign as practice.