UMass Boston

We offer concentrations in Bilingual Education, English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction for English language learners (ELLs), and Foreign Language Pedagogy (EFL and any other language taught in a foreign context). We present a wide range of opportunities to students interested in conducting research, working with community-based organizations, or preparing to teach in various contexts, such as public schools, K-12, adult education, and language schools in the United States and abroad. Many of our students go on to pursue doctoral work in such fields as linguistics, education, language policy, and literacy studies.

Looking to find us on campus? We are located in the McCormack Building, 4th Floor, room 456 (opposite of the Anthropology department).

Dr. Carhill-Poza & Dr. Panayota Gounari | Bilingual/Multilingual Education & Social Resources and Social Contexts in Language Learning
Dr. Carhill-Poza and Dr. Panayota Gounari lead CREATE (Centering Relationships, Equity, and Access for Teachers of English Learners), a $2.9 million Professional Development Grant by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition. The five-year project is designed to increase teacher and district capacity to serve English Learners in 8 high-needs urban school districts in Greater Boston. The CREATE team is working with 120 in-service teachers and paraprofessionals to develop praxis and advocacy within communities of practice centered on multilingual students. With partner districts, the project is using mixed methods to document innovative strengths-based practices at the classroom, school, and district level. Of particular interest is how family-school partnership can support teachers in developing meaningful understandings of multilingual students’ assets and translating that knowledge into the classroom practices.

Dr. Carhill-Poza | Bilingual/multilingual Education & Social Resources and Social Contexts in Language Learning
Dr. Carhill-Poza and her research team are collaborating with three local high schools to learn about the experiences of adolescent immigrant students who are also classified as English Learners, how and under what circumstances social support—particularly bilingual peer support—can facilitate their academic achievement and language development. Social support plays an important (but invisible) role in learning outcomes that are often considered individually determined for immigrant students who are still learning English. The team are interviewing immigrant-origin students about how their friends, families, teachers, and other important people in their lives support their learning. Researchers are also talking to teachers, counselors, coaches, and parent coordinators and ethnographically documenting students’ experiences in school. The Spencer-funded project has included documenting the effects of COVID on students and schools and is providing professional development to school partners in order to leverage all assets in educating immigrant students who are learning English.

Dr. Sclafani and Dr. Gounari | Bilingual/Multilingual Education & Critical Applied Linguistics
Dr. Sclafani, Dr. Gounari and their research team are building and expanding on the Justice Language Action Project (JLAP). The goal of JLAP is to introduce critical language awareness to elementary, middle, and high school classrooms in the Boston area through partnerships with teachers who have taken coursework in the UMass Boston graduate program in Applied Linguistics, as part of their preparation for Massachusetts ESL licensure. Through this partnership, teachers receive focused training in Critical Discourse Analysis and learn about classroom applications. The workshop provides them with space for reflection, conversation, and feedback as they develop social justice-themed curricular units for their classrooms that culminate in the creation of collaborative student-generated digital projects in which their students interrogate, research, and reform the social, environmental, and educational policies affecting their lives. The JLAP Research Team has used project data in their upcoming book chapter The Justice Language Action Project: Critical Linguistics for Inclusion and Equity in K-12 Classrooms. In A. Charity Hudley, C. Mallinson, M. Bucholtz (Ed.), Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics. Oxford University Press.

Dr. Etienne | Bilingual/Multilingual Education
Dr. Etienne is a sociolinguist interested in the social meaning of variation, language attitudes, norms, and language ideologies, and multimodal foreign language teacher education. She explores sociolinguistic competence among users of French in France and other Francophone countries examining how variation in language use reveals how language users manipulate specific linguistic forms to index or mark their identity in a given situation. More specifically, Dr. Etienne looks at teacher talk and stylistic variation in the classroom. Her goal is to make student-teachers aware of discursive classroom practices, which, instead of fostering students’ inquiry about language, stifle their voices and opportunities for learning. Professor Etienne has several projects: “What teachers say in class and what they mean”: Completing analysis of data collected in France “Teaching for diversity: instructors and learners’ voices”: Exploring perceptions of diversity in foreign language courses offered at UMass (Japanese; Chinese; French, and possibly others) Collaborative meaning construction in SLA.

Dr. Chun | Critical Applied Linguistics & Social Resources and Social Contexts in Language Learning
Dr. Chun is working on his next book, The Language of Our Politics, for Cambridge University Press. This sociolinguistic ethnography explores the myriad and complex intereffecting dynamics with the uses of our language with our politics. The phrase "our politics" here refers to not only political leaders and politicians and their discourses of the nation, economy, and society, but also the politics of everyday people in the ways in which we enact it through language and its materialized actions such as Othering, violence towards selected people, rallies, protests, uprisings, and opposing or supporting wars by governments continuing colonialist legacies worldwide.

Dr. Carhill-Poza and Dr. Rosalyn Negrón | Multilingual Language Policy & Social Resources and Social Contexts in Language Learning
Dr. Carhill-Poza and Dr. Rosalyn Negrón are working with their research team to understand the role of social connections in the academic success and identity of multilingual university students. In collaboration with colleagues in the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and South Korea, the research team is collecting mixed methods data about the social networks of immigrant-origin students from their first year of post-secondary education for five years. By mapping these relational trajectories across evolving contexts and identities, the researchers hope to identify underutilized peer, family, and community supports that, when viewed as assets, can facilitate degree attainment, the development of identities as successful multilingual students, and valorize a wider range of relationships and knowledge in university settings.

Dr. Gounari | Critical Applied Linguistics
Dr. Gounari’s ongoing research is situated in Critical Discourse Studies and builds on three projects: (1) The exploration and analysis of far-right authoritarian populist and extremist discourses in the United States, particularly as they manifest in social media and extremist online platforms. Part of this research has been published in her most recent book From Twitter to Capitol Hill: Far-right Authoritarian Populist Discourses, Social Media and Critical Pedagogy (Brill 2022). (2) ‘epistemic crisis’ and the discourse of conspiracy theories in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. (3) the normalization of far-right populist discourse in Greece using the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA).

Dr. Urbanski | Sociocultural Theory
Dr. Urbanski and her research team are currently working on a variety of projects investigating the literacy development of intermediate-level university L2 French learners. Some of these include research on students in a full classroom versus small groups, the students’ literacy development that is both cognitive and emotional, and the role of the teacher/research and students’ multimodality in literacy development. This research is informed by Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and gesture and multimodality from a McNeillian perspective. The full data set includes qualitative as well as quantitative data such as assessment data, verbalization data, and audio/video recordings. The audio/video data is transcribed using a combination of a conversation analytic framework and a McNeillian gesture framework.