Professional Biography
Anne Pomerantz is an applied linguist, language instructor, and teacher educator. She is an expert in the teaching and learning of new languages in classroom and community contexts. At Penn GSE, Dr. Pomerantz directs the Ed.D. specialization in Educational Linguistics and teaches courses on language pedagogy, intercultural communication, and discourse analysis. She works closely with the Penn Language Center to support the dynamic and diverse education community on the Penn campus, including co-convening the annual Penn Language Educators Symposium. Skilled in community-engaged teaching, Dr. Pomerantz mentors university students who work as language educators and ethnographers in immigrant-serving organizations and has developed several academically based service-learning courses.
In addition to her work with language educators and researchers, Dr. Pomerantz helps educators who are not language specialists succeed in linguistically diverse classrooms. She designs and teaches workshops for university faculty, K-12 teachers, and community-based educators who want to support bi/multilingual students more effectively.
Before joining the faculty at Penn GSE, Dr. Pomerantz was a Spanish teacher and a coordinator of Spanish language instruction in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. She also taught English as an additional language to adults and children in a variety of educational and community settings. Her first position as a language educator was at the Hudson School in Hoboken, NJ, where she taught Spanish and Latin to middle school students.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Pomerantz uses insights and tools from linguistic ethnography to examine humor and other forms of playful talk in multilingual educational spaces. In her research, she asks: Why do people engage in non-serious talk in educational settings? What factors should educators keep in mind when using humor in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms? Is the ability to use humor part of one’s intercultural competence? Is humor even teachable? Answers to these and other questions can be found in Humor in the classroom: A guide for language teachers and educational researchers (Routledge, 2016), a book she co-authored with Nancy D. Bell (GSE ’02).
Dr. Pomerantz is currently at work on a project that documents the kinds of interactions that take place in afterschool academic support programs that pair volunteer tutors with immigrant children. She has found that drawing tutors’ attention to the functions of playful talk in these multilingual, intercultural encounters can help them to build better rapport with tutees and provide more effective instruction.
Selected Publications
