About CAL
We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the individual accomplishments of our previous Tucker Fellows and their contributions to CAL’s work. Following is a complete list of Tucker Fellows, from the first recipient in 1992 to the most recent 2007 Fellow, along with a brief description of their studies and work at CAL.
2007: Erin McCloskey
Erin McCloskey taught Spanish and English as a second or foreign language in a variety of contexts—adult and K-12 students, private and public settings, in the United States and abroad—for 9 years before becoming an Ed.D. candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is currently writing the qualifying paper for her dissertation, focusing on the research and evaluation of technological professional development opportunities for foreign language educators.
During her time at CAL, Erin assisted in the design of new modules for CAL’s online professional development course, SOPA Online Training, attending specifically to the match between teachers’ contexts, the online environment, and the goals of the SOPA (Student Oral Proficiency Assessment).
2006: Erin Haynes
Erin Haynes, a graduate student at the University of California,
Berkeley, was selected as CAL’s Tucker Fellow for 2006. Erin is
pursuing her PhD in Linguistics, with a focus on Native
American Language Revitalization.
In July 2006, Erin completed a 3-week immersive research session at CAL’s offices in
Washington, DC. Erin met with CAL staff to work on her planned research project on
the academic effects of Native language programs, including developing statistical data
and discussing effective study instruments to use.
2005: Silvia Pessoa
Silvia, a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University focusing on second language acquisition, was chosen as the 2005 G. Richard Tucker Fellow. She chose to conduct an ethnographic qualitative study of a community of Urugaian immigrants in Elizabeth, NJ for her dissertation research. Specifically, she focused on biliteracy (English and Spanish) among high school students, mainly involving first and second generation Urugaians, but also some third generation students
While at CAL, Silvia worked on a project that focused on adolescent ESL literacy, conducted database searches, and read and wrote abstracts for a literature review which also focused on adolescent literacy.
2004: Alexis Lopez
2004 candidate Alexis Lopez, a native of Colombia, was pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. His research interests included social issues related to testing, such as washback, impact, and the effect of tests on classroom instruction and on people’s lives. His work in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and with the Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) program focused on language testing and early literacy development for bilingual children. While in residency at CAL, Lopez worked in the Language Testing Division on a project known as WIDA. He assisted the WIDA team in writing tasks for the tests, evaluating responses from the pilot test, and determining scoreable test items.
2003: Melinda Martin-Beltran
Because her dissertation topic was related to the two-way immersion (TWI) research project at CAL, Melinda Martin-Beltran welcomed the opportunity to work closely with CAL’s TWI project staff. Her work at CAL involved exploring pieces of the qualitative research and coding data from field notes, focusing on student writing strategies and student interaction with language use. Martin-Beltran continues to work on this project to examine the negotiation of meaning that takes place among students in two-way immersion programs. Martin-Beltran also collected data from TWI programs for her dissertation research on the collaborative nature of interactions between students of different linguistic backgrounds during writing and language exchange activities.
Tucker Fellows > 2002 - 1999
