Carolyn Adger

Carolyn Temple Adger serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Linguistics, where she directed the Language in Society Division and the Language Education and Academic Development Division before retiring. She also conducted research and technical assistance on language in education, including dialect diversity, classroom discourse, teachers’ professional talk, aspects of educating English learners in the U.S., and building children’s biliteracy in developing countries. Since then, she has worked on educational programs for literacy learning in several African countries, as well as assisting with a Government research program that focused on language analysis and language use in a cultural context. She holds an M.S. in linguistics and a Ph.D. in sociolinguistics from Georgetown University, as well as an M.S. in English education from the University of Maryland. Dr. Adger’s publications include two editions of What Teachers Need to Know About Language, co-edited with Catherine Snow and Donna Christian, and two editions of Dialects in Schools and Communities, co-authored with Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, among other books and monographs, articles, and book chapters. Dr. Adger is a former teacher of English language arts.