Elaine Allard is a Ph.D. student in Educational Linguistics. Her research interests include secondary education for language minority students in the US, ESOL and bilingual curriculum and materials development, teacher training, and education in the new Latino Diaspora. She has contributed to and presented papers at AAAL, AERA, AAA and Penn TESOL East. Before coming to GSE, Elaine worked as a high school ESL teacher in North Philadelphia, and taught EFL in Rome, Italy to children and adults. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and Latin American Studies from Swarthmore College and is also completing her MsEd in TESOL at GSE.

email: eallard@dolphin.upenn.edu

Julia Deak is a Ph.D. student in Educational Linguistics. She received her BA in Sociology and Music at Brandeis University and taught English as a Foreign/Second Language both abroad and in the US before beginning graduate studies. Julia's research interests include: theories of Second Language Acquisition, Heritage Language Learning, supporting bilingualism and biliteracy in Americans with home languages other than English, and using teacher education to close the school achievement gap in speakers of African-American English.

email: jdeak@dolphin.upenn.edu

Mariam Durrani is a doctoral candidate in the Educational Linguistics program. She is originally from Lahore and spent her formative years between Bavarian Germany and the American Southwest. While receiving her M.A. in English, concentration in Rhetoric, Mariam taught first-year university composition courses at the University of New Mexico. From 2006-2009, Mariam taught first-year writing courses at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and the Aga Khan University in Pakistan, organized and coordinated the first student-run academic writing center at LUMS and worked in educational public/private partnerships in Lahore and Karachi. She is fluent in Urdu-Hindi and semi-fluent in Punjabi. Her research interests include but are not limited to ethnographic research in multilingual educational settings; communicative repertoires of diasporic students; the application of linguistic anthropological theory and methodology for multilingual education research; public/private education partnerships in urban Pakistan; language policy and curriculum development that address the needs of multilingual student populations. 

email: mdurrani@gmail.com

Cécile Evers is a doctoral student in Educational Linguistics. She is originally from San Francisco and received her B.A. in Development Studies and Linguistics from UC Berkeley. She is interested in Islam, language policy concerning Muslim immigrants, and Middle Eastern and West African oral traditions. How do oral traditions develop in diaspora contexts and how are they dealt with by the public school system? Cécile enjoys studying Arabic and Wolof, and loves phonetics and phonology! She has taught Spanish at a high school in San Francisco and worked in Senegal for an NGO that localizes software in Senegalese national languages. She hopes to be involved in bilingual education (with immigrant minority languages) in the near future.

email: ceve@gse.upenn.edu

Bridget Goodman is a doctoral student in Educational Linguistics. Her research interests are Sociolinguistics, Language Socialization, and World Englishes. Bridget earned her Master’s Degree in TESOL from Penn GSE in 2001. She was a U.S. Department of State English Language Fellow in Ukraine (2001-2003) and in nearby Moldova (2003-2004). She has also conducted teacher training in Togo and Peru with grants from the State Department, and taught at Samsung in South Korea. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program, Bridget taught conversation, pronunciation, and TESOL conversation methods at the University of California, Riverside.

email: bgoodman@dolphin.upenn.edu

As a Doctoral student in Educational Linguistics, Haley is pursuing research in comparative Indigenous language education policy, bi/multilingual education for minority immigrant and Indigenous communities, and drama in language learning.  She was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Luxembourg (2009-2010), participating in the Language, Culture, Media and Identities Research Unit and teaching a class on 'Performance, Presentation and Communication' for undergraduate students.  She received her MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Victoria, Canada (2009), and her BA in Combined Social Science (Anthropology, Linguistics and Human Geography) from Durham University, U.K. (2005).  Originally from Michigan, Haley studies Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) and is active in Indigenous language education and revitalization initiatives.

email:hde@gse.upenn.edu

Kathy Lee is a doctoral student in the Educational Linguistics program at GSE. Her research interests include dual language bilingual programs, heritage language education, and World Englishes. Prior to GSE, she taught ESOL in Arlington, VA and EFL in Seoul, Korea. She earned a B.S. in Linguistics and an M.A.T. in TESOL and Bilingual Education at Georgetown University.

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Genevieve Leung is a doctoral student in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include the use of written vernacular Cantonese in Hong Kong, Cantonese popular music and rap, heritage language maintenance, and East Asian sign languages. She holds MA degrees in both Linguistics (TESOL) and Education (Language and Literacy) from UC Davis and a BA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley. At Davis, she worked on a longitudinal study on early literacy of immigrant children in California. She has also taught English to high school students in Japan as well as to international students at Stanford University and UC Davis. Genevieve enjoys playing Scrabble and eating good food, sometimes simultaneously.

email: gleung@dolphin.upenn.edu

Sarah Lipinoga is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Educational Linguistics at the Graduate School of Education. While working for an educational non-profit within a predominantly Latino/a Boston Public Middle School she became interested in how families’ familiarity with U.S. school systems and access to linguistic resources to advocate for their children impact their children’s educational pathways. She is currently interested in ethnographic research in communities that are part of the New Latino Diaspora to understand how schools work with and adopt to changing community needs (including linguistic needs) and how voices in the community (especially undocumented, recently arriving immigrants) shape change within these schools. Sarah holds a M.Ed. from Lesley University in Curriculum and Instruction and a B.A. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Bowdoin College. 

email: slipinogl@dolphin.upenn.edu

Xiaolin Peng is a doctoral student majoring in Educational Linguistic in the Graduate School of Education. Originally from China, she completed her masters degree in Language Education at the University of Georgia. She has also taught English and Chinese to adult learners in China and in the US. Her main research interests include adult second or foreign language acquisition, task-based language instruction and language assessment.

email: xiaolin@dolphin.upenn.edu

Jamie Schissel is a doctoral student in the Educational Linguistics program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include language policy and language education policies with a focus on media representations of policy and test accommodation policies for English language learners. Before joining the GSE, she earned an MAT ESL from Georgetown University and worked at the Center for Applied Linguistics in the Language Testing Division. Jamie has taught German and English as a second language to ages 4 to adult and spent 2003-4 in Germany as a Fulbright foreign language teaching assistant at the Limesschule Gesamtschule. Jamie holds a B.A. in German with teacher certification in German and TESOL from the University of Northern Iowa.

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Krystal Smalls is a joint PhD student in Educational Linguistics and Africana Studies. She is interested in discursive self-making and social-identification processes of black-identified multilingual adolescents whose communicative repertoires include non-standardized and/or hybridized English varieties. Her work focuses on African and Caribbean
immigrant youth in the Philadelphia area and Gullah youth in the South Carolina Low-Country and Sea Islands. She is interested in schools as sites of intense social interaction and language contact where young people negotiate competing race and language ideologies to create syncretic registers, selves and identities. Before coming to Penn, Krystal ran youth programs in Brooklyn, taught high school English in Richmond and was a legislative aide on Capitol Hill working on education and social services. She is currently a co-editor of the Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (2010-2011).

email: ksmalls@dolphin.upenn.edu

Karl Swinehart is a joint doctoral student in Educational Linguistics and Anthropology. He received his M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of California Los Angeles in 2006, writing a master’s thesis titled: “A Romance (with) Language: African-Americans learning Spanish in a Bilingual Community." Karl has taught in diverse instructional settings. He worked for six years in south central Los Angeles as a bilingual elementary teacher and then as a high school Spanish instructor. At UCLA he taught E.S.L. to both undergraduate and graduate students and, most recently, he has taught discourse analysis and other topics in applied linguistics to bilingual educators and social science researchers at both the Program for the Formation of Intercultural Bilingual Education for Andean Countries (PROEIB-Andes) and the Universidad de la Cordillera in Bolivia. His research interests include bilingualism and language contact, indigenous language maintenance and revitalization, language structure and function, discourse analysis, language and social relations, register formation, communicative practices of institutions and mass media, Nordic, Romance and Andean linguistics.

email: karls2@dolphin.upenn.edu

Christopher is pursuing a Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics. Before coming to Penn, he taught English in Los Angeles to Japanese expatriate managers and their families while obtaining my M.A. in TESOL. His undergraduate university was Berkeley, where he majored in linguistics. He is the current co-editor of the Working Papers in Educational Linguistics journal. Christopher is also a graduate student mentor and teacher’s assistant in the Work-Based Learning Leadership program. His research interests are in cognitive learning, intercultural pragmatics, and especially, work-based language training and organizational language policy.

email: chthomas@dolphin.upenn.edu

Ming-Hsuan Wu is a doctoral student in the Educational Linguistics program at the Graduate School of Education. Before coming to Penn, she spent several years teaching English in Taiwan where she grew up and one year in Panama, teaching Chinese and computer in Panama as a volunteer. She is currently exploring mixed research methods in education, language testing and assessment. Her current research interests are governmental approaches to children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in the United States and in Taiwan (e.g., Head Start) with a focus on language acquisition among these children. She is also interested in cross-linguistic transfers among Chinese-English bilinguals. She holds a M.S. Ed in Educational Policy from University of Illinois and a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literature from the Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan.

email: mwu2@dolphin.upenn.edu