Member, CAL Board of Trustees 2019 – 2021
Shondel Nero is Professor of Language Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University (NYU)’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
A native of Guyana, Nero earned her undergraduate degree in French and Spanish at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada; and master’s and doctoral degrees in TESOL and applied linguistics respectively from Columbia University’s Teachers College. She taught in the English Department at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, and in the School of Education at St. John’s University, Queens, NY, prior to joining the NYU faculty.
Nero is an applied linguist whose research examines the politics, challenges, and strategies of educating students who speak and/or write in nonstandard varieties of English, World Englishes, and Creoles. She is best known for her research on the linguistic and educational challenges of speakers of Caribbean Creole English in US and Caribbean schools, which has contested the notion of native speakership in TESOL and its consequences for related issues on language and identity, and language education policy. Her work has appeared in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Linguistics and Education, World Englishes, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Language Policy, and Language, Culture, and Curriculum. Nero is the author of Englishes in Contact: Anglophone Caribbean Students in an Urban College (Hampton Press, 2001), editor of Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education (Routledge, 2006), and co-author with Dohra Ahmad of Vernaculars in the Classroom: Paradoxes, Pedagogy, Possibilities (Routledge, 2014). She is also an editorial board member of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.
Nero is the inaugural recipient of the James E. Alatis Prize (2016) for an outstanding article on research in language policy and planning in educational contexts based on her work as a Fulbright scholar in Jamaica, where she examined the implementation of the Jamaican Language Education Policy in schools. She has been a plenary speaker at the TESOL and AAAL Conferences and at international conferences in Australia, Italy, Canada, and Mexico. She also leads an annual study-abroad program in the Dominican Republic as a means of developing teachers’ linguistic and intercultural competence.
