Carl Blyth

Carl Blyth is the Director of the Texas Language Technology Center (TLTC) and Associate Professor of French Linguistics in the Department of French and Italian.  He has held several administrative positions prior to TLTC: Coordinator of Lower Division French (1993-2002), Acting Director of Technology, Literacy and Culture (2001-2002), and Director/Asst Director of the UT Summer Program in Lyon, France.

Since 1994, he has worked with colleagues on three different language technology projects: a CD-ROM to accompany a commercially produced textbook (Parallèles Interactive), an online reference grammar of French (Tex's French Grammar), and a multimedia-based first year French program (Français Interactif).  What Carl finds most exciting about language technology is the collaboration it engenders among faculty, students, artists/designers and technologists.  In particular, he enjoys the organic nature of project teamwork – how ideas are created and evolve within the group and how different members play important complementary roles.

In addition to his efforts in electronic publishing, Carl has also written various journal articles, chapters, and books.  Most notably, he was author of Untangling the Web: Nonce's Guide to Language and Culture on the Internet (1999) and editor of The Sociolinguistics of Foreign Language Classrooms (Heinle, 2003).

More recently, he co-authored with Stacey Katz (Univ. of Utah) Teaching French Grammar in Context (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2007).  Currently, he serves as the Series Editor of Issues in Language Program Direction, an annual volume devoted to foreign language learning in higher education.  As his publications indicate, his main research interests lie at the intersection of sociolinguistics and language learning.

Taking literally Voltaire's sage advice to cultivate one's own garden ("cultiver son jardin"), Carl and his partner Joe Salvato, a landscape designer, spend free time caring for a wide assortment of Texas native plants.  They also like to hang out at their ranch east of Dime Box, Texas – where they plant trees, punch an occasional cow and drive an old but reliable blue tractor.  Caring for trees and cows and technology projects can all be fun, but Carl's greatest pleasure and challenge comes from raising his three daughters.