Conference Speakers

Professor Emerita, Urban Education; Latin American, Iberian, and Latina Cultures (LAILAC), Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY)

Keynote Presentation: Translanguaging Pedagogy in Community-Based Language Schools

This presentation focuses on these questions:

• What can we learn about children´s bilingual development by focusing on children who attend community-based language schools and whose families´ language practices at home go beyond simply English?
• How does their bilingualism differ from those who learn a second language in school?
• What has been the role of community-based language schools in the U.S. in the development of American children´s bilingualism?
• What pedagogical practices do teachers use in such schools to ensure that children make meaning of family language practices and develop them as part of their own repertoire?

By taking up translanguaging as the theoretical lens through which to listen to the children’s complex bilingual practices at home, and the ways they are leveraged in these community-based language schools, we question some of the assumptions that have been made about bilingualism and the education of bilingual children in the nation’s public schools. We focus on the experience doing bilingualism of community participants and families, as well as the parents’ and teachers’ practical wisdom in teaching their own children bilingually. We then draw lessons about bilingualism and bilingual teaching that could be of use in all U.S. bilingual communities, as well as in the nation’s public schools.

Biography: Ofelia García is Professor Emerita in the Ph.D. programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has published widely in the areas of bilingualism and bilingual education, the education of language minoritized bilinguals, sociology of language, and language policy. Among her best-known books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective; and Translanguaging; Language, Bilingualism and Education (with Li Wei), which received the 2015 British Association of Applied Linguistics Award. In 2017 she received the Charles Ferguson Award in Applied Linguistics. The American Educational Research Association has awarded her two Lifetime Research Achievement Awards ––Distinguished Contributions to Social Contexts in Education (2019) and Bilingual Education (2017), as well as the Second Language Acquisition Leadership through Research Award (2019). She recently received the 2022 ADFL Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession from the Modern Language Association. She is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Co-director, American Councils Research Center; Co-Founder and Chief Language Officer of Jeenie, immediate human interpretation in 300+ languages

Presentation: The America’s Languages Portal: Model Programs and Practices Advancing Access and Equity in U.S. Language Education

Language as an obstacle to social, health, and legal services in the U.S. is a social justice issue being taken up across the nation. Language education too must be understood as a social justice need to address the historically unequal access for learners in marginalized bilingual and disadvantaged monolingual communities.

To address language education as a social justice issue, the “America’s Languages Initiative” is directed at documenting where and how access to effective and relevant language education is provided to Native American, heritage, immigrant, refugee, Latinx, Black and Brown, and other disadvantaged rural and urban communities in all of America’s languages. “America’s languages” includes all of this multilingual nation’s languages: indigenous, colonial, immigrant, educational (foreign, world, ancient), and sign. The term is meant to accentuate the rightful place of indigenous and immigrant language programs within the language education system.

This presentation will describe and invite applications to the foundational website, the America’s Languages Portal: Model Programs and Practices Advancing Access and Equity in U.S. Language Education, an unprecedented data set of language programs that currently increase equitable access to historically underserved learners and languages in the United States. We will focus particularly on community-based heritage language schools as a critical component of this unprecedented national effort to incentivize a more just language education system serving more, and more diverse, learners and all of America’s languages.

Biography: Richard Brecht, Harvard M.A & Ph.D., is University of Maryland Professor Emeritus, co-director of the American Councils Research Center, and Co-Founder of Jeenie™, a business providing language support and cultural coaching to ordinary people facing everyday communication problems around the world. Involved since its beginning in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Language Education initiative and having drafted one of its briefing papers (America’s Languages: Challenges and Promise), he is an active member of the America’s Languages Initiative Working Group since its establishment in 2017 and leads the building of the web-based America’s Languages Portal: Model Programs and Practices Advancing Access and Equity in U.S. Language Education, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As an academic entrepreneur, he has been a leader in building and leading numerous academic organizations, including American Councils for International Education, the Center for Advanced Study of Language, the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages, and the National Foreign Language Center. Dr. Brecht has testified multiple times before Congressional committees; made many academic presentations; and authored and edited numerous scholarly books, textbooks, manuals, articles, and reviews on language policy, second language acquisition, and Slavic and Russian linguistics.

University of Toronto

Presentation: Doing Powerful Things with Language: How Heritage Language Schools and ‘Mainstream’ Education Can Work Together

How can parents and educators enhance the impact of community-based heritage language instruction? This question goes back to Joshua Fishman’s pioneering research in the 1970s when he reported that although heritage language proficiency gains in many schools were modest, community-based heritage language instruction played a significant role in promoting a sense of ethnic identity among students. This presentation will describe recent initiatives in both North America and Europe that highlight the benefits of ‘mainstream’ schools adopting a ‘language-friendly approach’ that ‘normalizes’ and affirms the value of students’ knowledge of additional languages in ways that can greatly enhance students’ motivation to develop their heritage language knowledge and opens up rich possibilities for cooperation and coordination between community-based heritage language schools and educators in ‘mainstream’ school environments.

Biography: Dr. Jim Cummins is a Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada. His research focuses on literacy development in educational contexts characterized by linguistic diversity. In addition to theoretical contributions dating from the 1970s regarding students’ heritage language bilingual development, has also worked actively with teachers over the past 25 years to identify ways of increasing the bilingual literacy engagement of learners in multilingual school contexts. His most recent book, Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners: A Critical Analysis of Theoretical Concepts, was published by Multilingual Matters in the Fall 2021.

Conference Presenters 

In alphbetical order

Janaki Bhatt-Singh is Program Director of the Hindi Language Program (HLP). She is an Engineer and MBA with a great passion for languages and cultures. She is a native speaker of Hindi along with Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi (Indian regional languages), Bahasa Indonesia and a little German. She is a mother, teacher and a business owner. She is the Program Director and Vice Principal for Hindi Language Program (HLP), which is a WASC accredited and UC a-g Off- Campus Credit approved program. HLP has been adopted by 3 school districts. All these school district students along with students from other schools in California are learning Hindi and fulfilling their world language credit requirements as well as achieving biliteracy.

Melissa A. Bowles, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC, at UCLA) and Professor of Spanish, Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on instructed second and heritage language acquisition, particularly the ways that instruction differentially affects the two populations. Her most recent book is an edited volume titled Outcomes of University Spanish Heritage Language Instruction in the United States (Georgetown University Press, 2022). Since teachers, parents, and families play a key role in shaping the extent to which heritage languages are transmitted and maintained across generations, as an extension of her research on heritage language acquisition she is wrapping up a public engagement project, The Bilingual Advantage Starts at Home (co-PI: Kim Potowski, University of Illinois-Chicago), that aims to eliminate misconceptions and raise awareness of the lifelong benefits associated with being bilingual to 1) already-licensed K-12 teachers, 2) parents and families who speak other languages at home, and 3) future K-12 teachers (bilingualadvantage.uillinois.edu). 

Gisi Cannizzaro, Ph.D., is originally from the U.S. and currently resides in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. With a background in linguistics and educational consultancy for internationally mobile families, she has helped found the charitable, non-profit organization Heritage Language Education Network with the aim of supporting multilingual children and HL programs in the Netherlands. The organization has facilitated the expansion of the Eindhoven Library's International Children's Book Collection and helps organize the annual conference of the Forum of Heritage Language Coalitions in Europe (FOHLC Europe).

Maria M. Carreira, Ph.D., is Emerita Professor of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach and co-founder and Emerita co-director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Professor Carreira's most recent project is The Heritage Language Exchange (HLXchange.com), a resource for heritage language teachers focused on issues of practice. Currently, she serves on the Board of ACTFL. 

Bianca Chang was appointed as a member of Maryland State Board of Education in 2021. She also served as President and on the Board of Directors of local, regional, and national non-profit 501C(3) educational organizations. She organized and orchestrated the first online student competition related to their language skills and the 26^th annual conference of the National Council of Associations of Chinese Language Schools (NCACLS) in 2020. The NCACLS is the umbrella organization for hundreds of community-based Chinese language schools in the United States. Being a first-generation immigrant in the U.S., she grew up with her boys in a public school system and started as a volunteer teacher at the first community-based Chinese heritage language school in Howard County, Maryland. Her perseverance drives her three boys to learn their native tongue. Gradually, she got more involved in education. A few of her goals related to language learners are to recognize all of their achievements, nurture competent global citizens, and reside in a harmonious world.

Antonella Cortese, Ph.D., is the President of the International and Heritage Languages Association (IHLA) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her work with IHLA concentrates on advocacy, resource support, and recognition of heritage language schools in communities located north of Red Deer, Alberta. She is the co-founder of the CPLI Scuola Italiana in Edmonton, Alberta, and has worked with heritage languages for over 20 years in the U.S. and Canada. 

Ken Cruickshank, Ph.D., has worked with heritage language schools in Australia for almost 40 years. He is Professor of Education at Sydney University in Australia. He is also Director of the Sydney Institute for Community Languages Education (SICLE), which runs courses for volunteer teachers that lead to accreditation in government schools. SICLE also provides free resources for teachers http://openlanguage.org.au/

J. Eik Diggs is a licensed Spanish language and ESL teacher with eight years of experience with heritage language curriculum design and teaching. She developed and taught a multi-year high school Spanish as a Heritage Language program in Minneapolis, Minnesota, infusing ethnic studies, the arts, identity work, and youth participatory action research. She anchors her language teaching in intra-ethnic studies and social justice content and focuses on developing young people who are strong in their multiple identities and backgrounds. She is a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona, where she is working with school and community partners to develop Grow Your Own initiatives to increase the numbers of socially conscious multilingual teachers of color.

Linda Egnatz is the Executive Director of the Global Seal of Biliteracy international language certification program, which provides three tiers of language credentials in over 130 languages for free. She is the President-Elect of the Joint National Committee for Languages-National Council for Languages and International Studies (JNCL-NCLIS), Advocacy Chair and Past President of the Illinois Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ICTFL), and a member of the Global Teachers Club Advisory Council. She is Nationally Board Certified (NBCT) and holds a Master’s degree in Spanish Literature from Purdue University. With 38 years of experience teaching Spanish at both the high school and university levels, she brings a breadth of experience and comprehensive understanding of vertical articulation issues and has shared that knowledge in World Language education methods courses as an adjunct instructor at DePaul University. Egnatz is a 2013 Golden Apple Awardee and was named the 2014 ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year. She has co-authored research studies on the Seal of Biliteracy and language assessment and was a contributing author to Foreign Language Education in America: Perspectives from K-12, University, Government, and International Learning. Her advocacy work on the Seal of Biliteracy, which includes providing testimony before the Illinois legislature, has been featured in Univision and Chicago Tribune interviews, and she continues to be an authoritative voice and advocate for Seal of Biliteracy programs nationally. Egnatz has published in the Foreign Language Annals, Hispania, The Language Educator, Language Magazine, and Education Weekly. She has presented internationally in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and is a recognized trainer in the area of language proficiency. In her Global Seal role, her focus is to provide a pathway to language certification and to create resources for bilinguals of any age to level up, leverage their bilingualism, and link to future opportunities to use their language skills.

Yueyue Fan, Ph.D., has more than 10 years of experience in applied research and program evaluation in K-12 schools and higher education. In addition to education research, Yueyue has a strong passion for supporting heritage language development. Her experiences as a heritage language teacher have made her a strong advocate for community-based heritage language schools and programs.

Angela Hasheva is a Founding Executive Director of the Association of Bulgarian Schools in America, and the Founder and Director of the Bulgarian School of Seattle, WA. She has led the development of partnerships with ALTA testing authorities, the Seal of Biliteracy and the Global Seal of Biliteracy Advisory Committees in many states across America.

Constantine Ioannou, Executive Director, International Language Educators Association (ILEA), Ontario, Canada, is an experienced teacher, teacher trainer, and curriculum leader in language teaching and learning who has been involved in the professional development of language educators within Canada and internationally. He works in the area of International Languages and Education in Ottawa, Canada, and collaborates with providers of heritage/international language programs across the province of Ontario. These programs operate under school districts that receive funds from the provincial Ministry of Education. Constantine is multilingual and works with various universities in TESOL teacher education programs. 

Gergana Ivanova is President and Principal Officer of the Bulgarian School of Atlanta Parent Foundation that supports and enriches the academic and extracurricular activities of the school as well as supporting families in the community. Her expertise includes contract negotiations, PTO management, fundraising, and event coordination. 

Ana Lúcia Lico is Brazilian, has lived outside of Brazil since 2003, and has worked with and studied heritage languages and heritage language education since 2005. She founded ABRACE (Brazilian Association for Culture and Education), a Brazilian community-based school, with two other moms, and she worked as the Executive Director for 14 years. A proud mom of two teenagers, Ana Lúcia is engaged in a Masters program focusing her research on teens and the role that their heritage language has on building a sense of belonging to their heritage identity.  

Tommy Lu, Ed.D., is a retired educator. He spent more than 25 years teaching Computer Science and IT-related courses as a full-time faculty and 10 years as the department chair. On weekends and nights, he spent more than 20 years serving various positions in heritage Chinese education, from teacher to principal to presidents at the local, regional, and national level. He is now working with a group of volunteers working with community-based heritage language schools, teaching all of the languages taught in these schools in the United States, to create communication, collaboration, and connections.

Renate Ludanyi, Ph.D., is a co-founder and president of the national umbrella of the U.S. German CBHL schools and co-founder and previous president/principal of the German School of Connecticut. Cooperating with the German education authorities, she has introduced to the U.S. the Sprachdiplom, an official German language certificate which, together with national school leaving examinations, entitles students in German CBHL schools to apply for university entry in Germany. She is a professor of German and director of the German Studies Center at Western Connecticut State University. Her interests are sociolinguistics, language maintenance, and the administration of HL schools, on which topics she has published and lectured nationally and internationally. In addition to various awards, she has received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Marta McCabe, Ph.D., is Founder and President of the Czech and Slovak School of North Carolina and a board member at the National Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools. She currently works with the English for International Students Program at Duke University Graduate School. Marta taught Czech language classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and served as a research scientist at the School of Education at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Her research focuses on transnational migration and education and examines the intersections of English language learning and heritage language maintenance.

Norma Najjar is founder and director of the Abjadiyah language program with the mission to preserve Arabic as a living language through in-person classes in Bethesda/Potomac, Maryland and online. She trains Arabic language teachers and has worked on several international projects and programs helping schools to improve and develop their sustainability.

Renata Emilsson Peskova is a lecturer and researcher at the School of Education, University of Iceland. Her research interests include plurilingualism, plurilingual pedagogies, language policies, heritage language education, and linguistic identities. She is the President of Móðurmál – the Association on Bilingualism.

Sara I. Ramirez is a Spanish linguistics doctoral student at Georgetown University. Before entering the Ph.D. program, she worked as a Spanish Instructor in both public and private education settings. She has experienced first-hand the growing number of heritage language learners inside university second language classrooms, which developed her interests in second and heritage language curriculum development, language ideologies surrounding heritage speakers’ varieties, and students’ internalization of such ideologies. Her research interests include critical language analysis as a pedagogical application in the Spanish heritage language classroom, having an impact on heritage speakers’ perceptions and attitudes towards their heritage language, and influencing learners’ linguistic insecurities. She is also interested in heritage speakers’ agency and how critical language awareness contributes to the development of critical language selves as heritage speakers learn to question and challenge linguistic ideologies and the status quo in the classroom. 

Paul Sandrock serves as ACTFL Senior Advisor for Language Learning Initiatives. While at ACTFL, Paul has facilitated the revision of the national World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages and the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements, and before that was a member of the original Integrated Performance Assessment development team. Previously, Paul was Assistant Director of Content and Learning at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), coordinating the areas of English language arts, mathematics, international education, and world languages. He earlier served as the Wisconsin DPI statewide consultant for world languages. Paul taught Spanish for 16 years in middle school and high school and authored The Keys to Assessing Language Performance as well as Planning Curriculum for Learning World Languages. Paul previously served ACTFL as a board member and president and received ACTFL’s Florence Steiner Award for Leadership in Foreign Language Education, K-12.

Rita Schmith has lived in the United States since 2001, and she has dedicated her career to education, in both Brazil and the U.S. She was the co-founder and coordinator of the Youth Volunteer Program (ProJov) at ABRACE for four years and started holding the position of School Director in June, 2022. 

Bhavya Singh, M.A., J.D., is an Instructional Technology Specialist, Hindi Pedagogy Expert, and resourceful lifelong learner who values teamwork, collaboration, and cross-functional engagements to deliver target objectives in instructional design and research-based second language acquisition for virtual and blended learning. She is a Hindi language facilitator at California Language Teachers’ Association, California. As the program director and Hindi instructor, she works with Hindi heritage language and foreign language learners at Bhasha Sanskriti, a global project-based Hindi heritage language program in San Francisco, California. She is currently serving as an Ed-Tech Pedagogy specialist at the Teacher Training Institute at New York University. 

Amanda Seewald, M.Ed., is President of the Joint National Committee for Languages - National Council for Languages and International Studies (JNCL-NCLIS). She is the owner of MARACAS Language Programs and Learning Kaleidoscope Educational Consulting. She is the author of the MARACAS curriculum and Easy Reader series. MARACAS publishes innovative curriculum materials and music to enhance language instruction and learning. Amanda received the 2020 NECTFL Nelson H. Brooks Award for Outstanding Leadership in the Profession. She is a past President of the Foreign Language Educators of New Jersey (FLENJ) and the N.J. State Representative for the National Network for Early Language Learning (NNELL). She has also served on the NECTFL board. Amanda has been teaching children, coaching educators, and developing curricula for over 20 years. Her expertise is in multilingual/multicultural curriculum and instruction, focused on early language learning as well as dual language immersion education. She works with educators and schools across the U.S. as well as in Europe to develop meaningful language programs founded in globally engaged curricula and strong interactive instruction. She is a regular presenter at national, regional, and state conferences. She is a speaker of Spanish, French, and Japanese. As an advocate for language education, Amanda works with federal and state legislative offices to garner support for legislation and funding. Her advocacy work in New Jersey led to the signing of the Seal of Biliteracy into law in 2016. It is her hope that through engaging and dynamic language programming, we will have a multilingual future for all children.

Anthony Thorpe, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Roehampton, London, UK. He publishes on the topics of education leadership, organization, and human resources. He has written various articles about the administration, leadership, and governance of heritage language and community schools and has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Management in Education on the topic. 

Mudita Tiwary is the Founder and Principal Director of Hindi Language Program. She is an IT professional with twelve plus years of experience in knowledge management in the hospital industry. She has immense interest in language, culture and traditions. She knows four Bhartiya Heritage Languages Hindi, Bengali, Avadhi and Angika.

The Hindi Language Program is a Hindi immersion school. Students who complete their three years program can attain high school foreign language credit. HLP is a WASC accredited and UC a-g Off- Campus Credit approved program. HLP also provides a seal of bi-literacy to their students. Hindi Language Program has been approved by three school districts Poway Unified School District, San Diego Unified School District and San Diego Union High School District. HLP has students from outside San Diego school districts as well.

Agnès Ndiaye Tounkara is Coordinator of the French Heritage Language Program (FHLP) at the FACE Foundation, a program of the cultural services of the French embassy that provides free French classes and workshops to heritage French speakers in New York and also in Maine, Florida, and Pennsylvania. She has been working with French language learners for more than 15 years, at the Alliance Française of Boston and in an international bilingual school in New York. Born and raised in Francophone Senegal (West Africa), her career path has always been driven by her passion for French and the Francophone cultures. She is a first-generation immigrant raising 3 children in the U.S., so the work we are doing is very close to her heart. She is also a Language Representative with the National Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools and a Member of the Advisory Board of CALEC (Center for the Advancement of Languages, Education and Communities).

Veronica Trapani, Ph.D., is the Associate Director for Secondary Content for World Languages and International Education at the state of Washington’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. She taught German and English for a decade in Michigan, Tennessee, New York, and Germany. She is the Membership Chair and Technology Coordinator for the National Council for State Supervisors for Languages and the K-12 Advisor for the National Less Commonly Taught Languages Resource Center (NLRC) at Michigan State University. Veronica’s interests, outside language acquisition and education, include cats, soccer, hiking, skiing, and musical theater.

Bob (Robert) Uriu, Ph.D., is a member of the Board of Trustees at Orange Coast Gakuen- Japanese Language School at Huntington Beach, California. As an active board chair, he been involved with all aspects of governance. A professor of Political Science at University of California, Irvine, he also co-wrote a paper about creating a new curriculum for Japanese weekend schools. 

Ching-Yi Yeh (Tracy), Ed.D., worked with heritage language learners for many years while she was obtaining her doctorate in the United States. She uses a wide variety of technological tools and mobile applications in her classes. Currently, her research focuses on student engagement in online settings.

Celia Chomón Zamora, Ph.D., currently serves as ACTFL’s Director of Professional Learning and Certification. With more than 15 years serving the language education community, Dr. Zamora has been a K-12 language teacher and administrator in public and private school settings, a postsecondary language program instructor and assistant director, and a researcher. The daughter of first-generation immigrants from Venezuela and Cuba, Dr. Zamora is a passionate advocate of heritage language learners. She currently serves as a scholar for the Diversity Executive Leadership Program (DELP). Dr. Zamora completed her doctoral degree in Spanish Applied Linguistics from Georgetown University, where she was awarded the Harold N. Glassman Distinguished Dissertation Award in the social sciences. At ACTFL, she is currently focusing on providing a platform to amplify the voices of underrepresented language learning communities, developing resources and communities of support for less commonly taught and Indigenous languages, and continuing to advocate for and support heritage language learners and teachers.