2007 CREATE Conference

Academic Language and Content:
A Focus on English Language Learners in the Middle School

Speaker Biography

GUADALUPE VALDÉS (Ph.D., Florida State University, 1972) is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University and holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Working in the area of applied linguistics, much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities.

Dr. Valdés specializes in language pedagogy and applied linguistics and works extensively with schools and organizations to serve the needs of young Englishlanguage learners. Her research has focused on Latino students in elementary, middle school, high school and college leading to five books and more than 70 articles. Her book Con respeto: Bridging the distance between culturally diverse families and schools (Teachers College Press, 1996) examines the lives of K-3 English-language learners and their families. Her more recent book Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: Young Interpreters of Immigrant Background (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003) focuses on high school students who serve as young interpreters for their parents, and her latest book Developing minority language resources: The case of Spanish in California (Valdés, Fishman, Chavez & Perez, Multilingual Matters, 2006) examines Spanish language maintenance and instruction in both secondary and postsecondary institutions. Her book Bilingualism and Testing: A Special Case of Bias (Ablex Publishing Co., 1994) is seen as a timely classic that explores the growing challenge of increased use of standardized tests. Recent articles on English language learners include: “Enhancing the development of students' language(s)” (with Bunch, G., Snow, C., & Lee, C.) In L. Darling-Hammond & J. Bransford (Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2005, and “Between support and marginalisation: The development of academic language in linguistic minority children.” International Journal of the Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, 2004.

 

Dr. Valdés presented Supporting English Language Learners' Success with Academic Language: What Teachers Need to Know at the 2007 CREATE Conference.

 

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