Project Archive
Members of the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth
Timothy Shanahan Panel Chair
Dr. Shanahan is Professor of Urban Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Director of the UIC Center for Literacy. He just completed a year as Executive Director of the Chicago Reading Initiative for the Chicago Public Schools. He was a member of the National Reading Panel that advised the U.S. Congress on reading research, and a member of the White House Assembly on Reading. Dr. Shanahan has published more than 100 books, articles, and chapters on reading education, and he received the Albert J. Harris Research Award for his work on reading disabilities. Professor Shanahan co-designed Project FLAME, a family literacy program for Latino immigrants, which has received an Academic Excellence designation from the U.S. Department of Education. He just completed a term as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Reading Association, and he serves on the Board of Directors of the National Family Literacy Center.
Isabel L. Beck
Dr. Beck is Professor of Education in the School of Education and Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, both at the University of Pittsburgh. She has engaged in extensive research on decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension, and has published approximately 100 articles and book chapters as well as several books. Most recently, she co-authored, Bringing Words to Life : Robust Vocabulary Instruction (with M. McKeown and L. Kucan, Guilford Press). Dr. Beck's work has been acknowledged with such awards as: the Oscar S. Causey Award for outstanding research from the National Reading Conference, and the Contributing Researcher Award from the American Federation of Teachers for "bridging the gap between research and practice." She is also a member of the International Reading Association's Hall of Fame, and most recently she received that organization's William S. Gray Citation. Among the criteria for which she received the latter was "initiation and development of original ideas that have. . . improved practices in reading."
Margarita Calderón
Dr. Calderón, a native of Juárez, Mexico is a Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR). Through a series of grants from OERI/IES, the Texas Education Agency, the Texas Workforce Commission, and the Department of Labor, she is conducting longitudinal research and development projects in El Paso, Texas regarding: teachers' learning communities, bilingual staff development, and adult English language learners. She conducts research in the ESL Reading, Spanish-English Transitional Reading, and Two-Way Bilingual Reading programs for the Success For All Foundation. She is collaborating with the Center for Applied Linguistics and Harvard University in an eight-year study on the transition from Spanish reading into English reading, funded by OELA, NICHD, and IES She directs the El Paso Adult Bilingual Curriculum Institute and co-directs the Alliance for Workplace Investment Center. She co-edited with Robert Slavin Effective Programs for Latino Students, and co-authored with Liliana Minaya-Rowe Implementing Two-Way Bilingual Programs. Other professional activities include the research and development of the Bilingual Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (BCIRC) model and the Teachers Learning Communities. She has received numerous awards for educational contributions and community service on the U.S.-Mexico border.
David J. Francis
Dr. Francis is Professor of Quantitative Methods and Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he also serves as Director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics. He is a Fellow of Division 5 (Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics) of the American Psychology Association and former Chairman of the Mental Retardation Research Subcommittee of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He currently serves as Chairman of the Advisory Council on Education Statistics, a national advisory board to the Commissioner of Education Statistics and the National Assessment Governing Board, and is a member of National Advisory panels for several federally-funded research centers and state departments of education. He is also a recipient of the University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award and a former member of the National Institutes of Health's Behavioral Medicine Study Section. His areas of quantitative interest include multi-level and latent variable modeling, individual growth models, item response theory, and exploratory data analysis. Dr. Francis is currently the Principal Investigator of an NICHD/IES-funded program project grant on oral language and literacy acquisition in Spanish-speaking children, and has collaborated for many years in research on reading and reading disabilities, attention problems, and developmental consequences of brain injuries and birth defects. Presently, Dr. Francis collaborates on multiple contracts and grants funded by NICHD, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the Texas Education Agency, and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Georgia Earnest García
Dr. García holds the rank of Professor in the Language and Literacy Division, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also holds a zero-time appointment in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and is a faculty affiliate with the Latinas/Latinos Studies Program. Dr. García was a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for the Study of Reading for six years and a Fellow in the Bureau of Educational Research from 1993-1996. She served on the Assessment Task Force, National Council on Education Standards and Testing, and, most recently, was a member of the RAND Reading Study Group on Skillful Reading. She was named a College of Education Distinguished Scholar in 1997, and was awarded the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, Advising, and Research by the Council of Graduate Students in Education in 1993. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Reading Conference from 1998-2000.
Dr. García's research has been funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (now the Institute of Education Sciences), the Office of Special Education Populations, and the Mellon Foundation. Her areas of research include the literacy development, instruction, and assessment of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, with much of her current research focusing on bilingual reading and writing. She has published her work in the American Educational Research Journal, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research/Reading Behavior, Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Review of Research in Education. She wrote the chapter on bilingual children's reading for the third volume of the Handbook of Reading Research and was co-guest editor for the themed issue on multicultural literacy research and practice for the Journal of Literacy Research.
Fred Genesee
Dr. Genesee is a Professor in the Psychology Department at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He is the author of nine books and numerous aricles in scientific, professional, and popular journals and publications. He has carried out extensive research on alternative approaches to bilingual education, including second/foreign language immersion programs for language majority students and alternative forms of bilingual education for language minority students. This work has systematically documented the longitudinal language development (oral and written) and academic achievement of students educated through the media of two languages—their home language and another language. Along with Donna Christian and Liz Howard, he is currently involved in a longitudinal national study of a number of two-way immersion programs in the U.S. He has consulted with policy groups in Canada, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Russia, Spain, and the U.S. on issues related to second language teaching and learning in school-age learners. Dr. Genesee is also interested in basic issues related to language learning, representation, and use in bilinguals. His current work in this domain focuses on simultaneous acquisition of two languages during early infancy and childhood. His specific interests include language representation (lexical and syntactic) in early stages of bilingual acquisition, transfer in bilingual development, structural and functional characteristics of child bilingual code-mixing, and communication skills in young bilingual children. A new line of research will examine the language/speech processing skills of pre-verbal bilingual and second language infants. Collectively, this work seeks to extend our understanding of the limits of the human faculty for language acquisition which, to date, has been based primarily on studies of monolingual acquisition.
Esther Geva
Dr. Geva is a Professor in the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. The bulk of Dr. Geva's research, publications, conference presentations, and workshops concerns issues in the development of second language reading skills in children and adults from various linguistic backgrounds: university students, children who are English language learners, and bilingual children who have developed their language and literacy in bilingual contexts such as English-Persian, English-Hebrew, and French immersion. In recent years, Dr. Geva's research interests have focused primarily on theoretical and clinical aspects of language and literacy development in primary level, ELL children. Her research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Education, and the National Center of Excellence.
Recently Dr. Geva obtained (with Michal Shany from Haifa University) a grant to study developmental and instructional issues in the literacy development of Ethiopian children in Israel. This grant, funded by the Israeli National Research Council, was awarded the Chief Scientist prize for the best research grant. Dr. Geva is a member of the Highly Qualified Personnel committee of the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network, and has served on various U.S. and Canadian committees concerned with literacy development in minority children. She has edited (with Ludo Verhoeven) a special issue of Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal entitled Cross-orthography Perspectives on Word Recognition, and co-edited a special issue in the Journal of Scientific Studies of Reading, entitled Basic Processes in Early Second Language Reading. Her clinical and research work with minority children resulted in the book Interprofessional Practice with Diverse Populations: Cases in Point (co-edited with A. Barsky and F. Westernoff). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Annals of Dyslexia, Language Learning, Applied Psycholinguistics, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Dyslexia.
Claude Goldenberg
Dr. Goldenberg, a native of Argentina, is a Professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Associate Dean of the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. He is currently involved in a number of ongoing research projects focusing on Latino children's academic development, home-school connections to improve achievement, home and school factors in Latino children's academic achievement, and the processes and dynamics of school change. His current research is supported by the Spencer Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
He received the Oustanding Dissertation Award (Empirical/Qualitative) from AERA and was a National Academy of Education Spencer Fellow. He has received a Research Recognition Award from the University of California Office of the President and was co-recipient (with co-author Ronald Gallimore) of the International Reading Association's Albert J. Harris Award.
Dr. Goldenberg was on the National Research Council's Head Start Research Roundtable and on the Council's Committee on the Prevention of Early Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Currently he is on the Reading Subcommittee of the National Academy of Education's Committee on Teacher Education. He has been on the editorial boards of Language Arts, The Elementary School Journal, and Literacy, Teaching and Learning and has served as a reviewer for numerous academic publications, publishers, and funding agencies.
Goldenberg's articles have appeared in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, American Journal of Education, The Reading Teacher, Language Arts, Educational Leadership, The Elementary School Journal, and other professional books and journals. In 1997, he produced Settings for Change, a video describing a successful five-year project to improve teaching and learning in a predominantly Hispanic school. A book based on this project will be published by Teachers College Press in 2003. Together with William Saunders, he produced a video and DVD depicting Opportunities through Language Arts (OLA), a middle elementary language arts program that helps English language learners develop English language and literacy skills.
Michael L. Kamil
Dr. Kamil is Professor of Education at Stanford University. He is a member of the Psychological Studies in Education Committee and is on the faculty of the Learning, Design, and Technology Program. His research explores the effects of computer technologies on literacy and the acquisition of literacy in first and second languages. Another line of research focuses on the uses of interactive agents in electronic text to support learning and comprehension. He has been editor of Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Reading Behavior, and The Yearbook of the National Reading Conference. He currently serves on several editorial advisory boards for reading journals. He was a member of the National Reading Panel, producing a synthesis of instructional research in reading. He was also a member of the Rand Corporation Reading Study Group, working on a research agenda in reading comprehension. He is the lead editor of Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III. In addition, he has edited, authored or co-authored over 100 books, chapters, and journal articles.
Keiko Koda
Dr. Koda is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. Her major research areas include second language reading, biliteracy development, psycholinguistics, and foreign language pedagogy. She is widely published in refereed journals and has authored numerous book chapters. She is currently a member of the editorial boards of Research in Second Language Learning, the International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, and the Modern Language Journal. She is a consultant to Educational Testing Service and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in second-language reading and assessment. She also serves as a member of the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) Committee of Examiners at Educational Testing Service. Her ongoing projects, involving learners of typologically diverse target languages, focus on issues uniquely associated with dual-language involvement in second-language reading-including the facilitation benefits of transferred skills in second-language lexical processing; orthographic distance effects on second-language decoding development; and cross-linguistic variations in learning to read Arabic, Chinese, and Korean. Her work is published in Applied Psycholinguistics, Cognition, Modern Language Journal, Journal of Child Language, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Second Language Research, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition.
Gail McKoon
Dr. McKoon is a Professor of Cognition, Psychology, and Psycholinguistics at Northwestern University. Her primary research interests are reading, human memory, and knowledge representation, and she is considered a leading expert in research on reading comprehension. She has served on advisory panels for the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health, and she has published over 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals. In 1985 she was designated by the Social Science Citation Indices as one of the 50 highest impact authors in psychology, and in 2002, she was honored by election to the prestigious Society for Experimental Psychology.
Robert S. Rueda
Dr. Rueda is a Professor in the Division of Learning and Instruction of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of Division 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues) of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Rueda's research interests center on the sociocultural basis of learning and instruction, with a focus on academic achievement (especially reading) in students in at-risk conditions, English language learners, and students with mild learning handicaps; children's acquisition and uses of literacy; and teaching/learning issues related to academic achievement in public school settings, including literacy-related assessment and instruction, educational decision making, and instructional issues related to English language learners. Much of his recent research has been funded through the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (now the Institute of Education Sciences), the National Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, and the National Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence. His articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Research in Education, Remedial and Special Education, Exceptional Children, and the Elementary School Journal. Recently, in monographs and book chapters, he has collaborated with others in treating the sociocultural issues involved in the teaching of diverse learners. He has served as a reviewer for a wide variety of journals of education and psychology and has been a member of the editorial boards of Review of Research in Education, Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, the NRC Yearbook, Exceptional Children, Education and Training in Mental and Mental Retardation.
Linda S. Siegel
Dr. Siegel holds the Dorothy C. Lam Chair in the Department of Special Education and is Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia. She has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles, as well as numerous other publications, on cognitive and language development (spanning oral language development as well as reading, writing, and spelling). She has received international recognition for her research in reading, learning disabilities (e.g., assessment and intelligence tests), bilingualism and language learning of French, Spanish, Chinese, Punjabi, Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, and other languages, and has published articles in Italian, French, and Spanish as well as in English. Dr. Siegel is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and Canadian Psychological Association.