Presenter and Facilitator Bios

Guadalupe Valdés, Opening Keynote

Guadalupe Valdés, PhD, is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University. Much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities. She has carried out extensive work on maintaining and preserving heritage languages among minority populations since the 1970's. Her early publications in this area include an edited volume of articles, Teaching Spanish to the Hispanic Bilingual: Issues, Aims and Methods (Valdés, Lozano, & García-Moya, 1981) and numerous book chapters and articles, including "The Role of the Foreign Language Teaching Profession in Maintaining Non-English Languages in the United States" in Languages for a Multicultural World in Transition (1992), "The Teaching of Minority Languages as 'Foreign' Languages: Pedagogical and Theoretical Challenges" (Modern Language Journal, 1995), "Teaching Spanish to Hispanic Bilinguals: A Look at Oral Proficiency Testing and the Proficiency Movement" (Hispania, 1989), and "Bilingualism, Heritage Learners, and SLA Research: Opportunities Lost or Seized" (Modern Language Journal, 2005).

Her work in the last several years in this area includes a book, The Development of Minority Language Resources: The Case of Spanish in California (with Joshua Fishman, Rebecca Chavez, and William Perez; Multilingual Matters, 2006) and a number of book chapters and articles, including "From Language Maintenance and Intergenerational Transmission to Language Hurvivance: Will 'Heritage Language' Education Help or Hinder?" (International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2017), "Heritage Language Students: Profiles and Possibilities" in the Handbook of Heritage, Community, and Native American Languages in the United States (2014), and "Latin@s and the Intergenerational Continuity of Spanish: The Challenges of Curricularizing Language" (International Multilingual Research Journal, 2015). She was awarded the Joshua Fishman Award for Outstanding Contributions and Leadership in the Heritage Language Field from the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA in 2010.

Martha G. Abbott

Martha G. Abbott is Executive Director of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). In that role, she provides leadership for ACTFL's initiatives that promote language education in the U.S. based on the national student standards that emphasize building communicative competence. In addition, she oversees the ACTFL national public awareness campaign, Lead with Languages. Prior to serving as Executive Director, she was Director of Education for ACTFL from 2004-2011. She currently serves on the National Security Education Board, appointed by President Obama in 2016, to serve a four-year term.

Her career began in Fairfax County Public Schools (VA), where she was a language teacher and administrator for more than 30 years. She taught Spanish and Latin at the elementary and high school levels and served as adjunct instructor at George Mason University. During her tenure in Fairfax County, she supervised a partial-immersion program in French, German, Japanese, and Spanish as well as FLES and high school programs in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and American Sign Language (ASL) in addition to the commonly taught languages French, German, Latin, and Spanish. She was responsible for training for 400+ language teachers in the school district and the conceptual and practical training through university course work, specialized workshops, and in-service training programs.

Marty has been involved in a number of national projects, including the development of the national student standards, the establishment of the ACTFL K-12 Performance Guidelines, and the development of beginning teacher standards for the Council of Chief State School Officers. She is a frequent presenter and keynote speaker at state, regional, and national language conferences. Her publications include "Academic Achievement through Japanese, Spanish or French: The First Two Years of Partial Immersion" with Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas, Modern Language Journal, 1993; "Critical Instructional Issues in the Classics for American Schools," Foreign Language Annals, 1990; "Foreign Languages are for Everyone," Apple Magazine, 1990; "Hyperreality and the Study of Latin: Living in a Fairy Tale World," Modern Language Journal, 1996 (with Sally Davis); and "Articulation Issues in K-12 Foreign Language Programs," in Critical Issues in Early Language Learning: Building for Our Children's Future.

Neila Baumilienė

Neila Baumilienė is a native of Lithuania. She initiated the establishment of the Alexandra Kazickas Lithuanian Heritage Language Saturday School in Eastern Long Island, New York in 2006, with the goal of helping her own and local Lithuanian American community children to preserve their heritage and to learn Lithuanian. In 2011, after the passing of Mrs. Kazickas, Neila was invited by the Kazickas Family Foundation (KFF) to create the Alexandra Kazickas Grant Program (AKGP) to support 40 Lithuanian schools across the U.S., and became executive director of the KFF NYC bureau soon after. Over the past years, thanks to AKGP, the Lithuanian Heritage Schools not only received a financial boost, but also collaboration was strengthened between the Ministry of Education and Science of Lithuania and the Education Councils of Lithuanians in the Diaspora. Since 2014, AKGP has been supporting establishment of the Lithuanian Language Level Test for Youth, which is internationally recognized as a proficiency test for Lithuanian as a foreign/heritage/second language. Neila holds an M.A. in Ethnology (Cultural Anthropology) from Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania, and has a passion for languages.

Liz Blesson

Liz Blesson is the Dual Language Program Analyst for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) Language Acquisition Division. She received her Bachelor's Degree from Boston College in Human Development and Applied Psychology, with minors in Spanish language and Latin American History. Her Master's Degree is in Educational Research, Measurement and Evaluation, also from Boston College. Prior to her work at DCPS, Liz served as a research analyst for the Two-Way Immersion Network for Catholic Schools (TWIN-CS) of the Roche Center for Catholic Education. As the Dual Language Program Analyst for DCPS, she is responsible for many of the data initiatives within the Language Acquisition Division. She is the point of contact for the DCPS Seal of Biliteracy and has worked to redesign the award criteria and improve outreach efforts to DCPS's culturally and linguistically diverse students.  

Katarina Brito

Katarina Brito is the Bilingual Program Developer for the District of Columbia Public Schools Language Acquisition Division. She has 29 years experience working with bilingual and ESL programs in California, New Mexico, and Washington DC. She has a Masters in Curriculum and Instruction with a TESOL emphasis from Trinity University and a BA from UC San Diego, in addition to a BCLAD from CAL State Dominguez Hills. Before joining DCPS as a Dual Language coach in 2004, Katarina worked as a Dual Language and ESL teacher in early childhood, elementary, and secondary school classrooms. She has extensive experience working with preservice and inservice teachers and has been a professional developer at Juniata College, Penn State University, and DC Public Schools. As the Bilingual Program Developer, Katarina is responsible for providing technical programmatic support to Dual Language programs as well as training to Dual Language administrators and educators. After learning about California's Seal of Biliteracy, Katarina was eager to bring the bilingual award to DC Public Schools. In 2015 DCPS became the first district in the region to recognize the achievement of their bilingual students with the Seal of Biliteracy.  

An Chung Cheng

An Chung Cheng, PhD, is professor of Spanish at the University of Toledo, Ohio, where she has also served as the Director of the Asian Studies Program and adviser of the Multi-Age Foreign Language Education Program at undergraduate and graduate levels. She specializes in second language acquisition and teacher education. Her research areas are in instructed second language acquisition, multilingualism, heritage language education, language input processing, and corpus-based approaches in third language acquisition. She has taught foreign language teacher education courses in the United States and abroad. Dr. Cheng has been actively involved in community-based Chinese heritage schools as a parent, teacher, member of the board of directors, and head of a weekend school. She was the principal investigator of a research project on Chinese heritage programs in the United States, funded by an International Research and Studies Grant of the U.S. Department of Education (2009-2013). She has been the program director and instructor of the STARTALK-CHELER Chinese Leadership Program at the University of Toledo for teachers of Chinese heritage schools each year since 2013. She is the chair of the ACTFL Less Commonly Taught Languages Special Interest Group and the president-elect of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages.

Claire Hitchins Chik

Claire Hitchins Chik, PhD, is an Associate Director of the Title VI National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC). Her most recent project is the development of an online certificate, Teacher Training for the 21^st Century: Teaching Heritage Languages. With her colleagues, Olga Kagan and Maria Carreira, she is a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education: From Innovation to Program Building (2017). She was awarded her PhD from the Department of Applied Linguistics at UCLA, choosing as a focus for her dissertation the language maintenance environment created by parents at a Chinese community-run Saturday school.  

Masako Douglas

Masako Douglas, PhD, is Professor of Japanese at California State University, Long Beach. Her research interest is on Japanese heritage language (JHL) development and education. She has been working on constructing and applying a theoretical framework to JHL curriculum design (grades K-8 and college courses) and developed curricula and instructional videos for community-based JHL schools and JHL college courses. She has publications on JHL young learners' language background, JHL acquisition, JHL literacy, and JHL pedagogy. She conducted research with her colleagues on young JHL learners' language development in an immersion program and at a community-based JHL school. She is one of the founders and currently the Chair of the JHL SIG of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese. She is also one of the founders of an online refereed journal, JHL Journal: Working Papers of Japanese Heritage Language Education, and an editorial board member of the Heritage Language Journal. She is also a board member of the Mother Tongue, Heritage Language, and Bilingual Education (MHB) Research Association in Japan. She is a recipient of American Association of Teachers of Japanese 2012 Teacher Award. 

Vijay Gambhir

Vijay Gambhir, PhD, has taught courses in language, linguistics, Hindi-Urdu pedagogy, and literature in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania from 1973-2010. Currently, she provides consultation to STARTALK Hindi-Urdu student and teacher-training programs. Dr. Gambhir is a leader in the field of pedagogy and has trained many South Asian and other less commonly taught language teachers for proficiency-based instruction and assessment. The Hindi Proficiency Guidelines and the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Hindi have been developed under her leadership. She has served on many local and national committees. She has provided consultation to several professional institutions including the National Foreign Language Center, Defense Language Institute, National Council on the Teaching of Less Commonly Taught Languages, National Capital Language Resource Center, Hindi-Urdu Flagship Program, and Kean University for their Hindi/Urdu pedagogy master's program. Her publications include Teaching and Acquisition of South Asian Languages, an edited volume published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and many scholarly articles published in recognized national and international journals and books. She is the co-author of a popular video instructional series, New Directions New People, for beginning and Intermediate Hindi learners. 

Joel Gómez

Joel Gómez, PhD, recently assumed the role of President and CEO of the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), a private, nonprofit organization promoting social equity through mother tongue education and world languages nationally and internationally. Previously, Dr. Gómez was department chair for the Department of Educational Leadership and Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at George Washington University. Dr. Gómez has a doctorate in higher education administration from George Washington University, with a focus on preparing teachers to work with linguistically and culturally diverse students, and completed doctoral coursework in foreign language education at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also earned an MA in Latin American Studies and a BA in Spanish. His research interests focus on bilingual education, first and second language education policy, and the education of linguistically and culturally diverse populations. He has managed large national and international projects, such as the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education (NCBE). At the international level, he has provided technical assistance services in Mexico, Central American and South American countries, Europe, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Dr. Gómez has served as President and Treasurer of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) and was a founding member of the Mexican and American Solidarity Foundation.  

Betsy Hart

Betsy Hart joined the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) in 1993 and serves as director of programs for the Center and program director for STARTALK. She is also a member of the Executive Committee, which provides strategic planning and leadership for the NFLC. Betsy directs the implementation of the STARTALK project tasks to ensure that they are conceptually on track, on time, and adhere to client requirements. In addition to providing language learning experiences for students and professional development opportunities for teachers in critical languages, the STARTALK program has created over 500 online and publicly-available resources to support less commonly taught languages and has sparked the development of a large number of new critical language programs. Throughout her tenure at the NFLC, her responsibilities have included oversight of $6 million annual budgets and the management of complex government‐funded projects. In addition, Betsy has been responsible for the recruitment and supervision of employees, interns, and consultants to staff multi‐million-dollar Center programs. Betsy is a frequent presenter at national conferences, where she disseminates lessons learned from STARTALK programs and explores innovative strategies for virtual coaching and mentoring STARTALK teachers throughout the academic year. She launched her career in higher education in Heidelberg, Germany, where she coordinated the scheduling of classes and professors throughout Europe for the University of Maryland's University College Overseas Programs. She holds an undergraduate degree in Education from Marywood University, a master's degree in Business Administration from Boston University, and completed a post‐graduate certificate program in Leadership and Management at the University of Maryland. In 2013, she completed the CMMI for Development course with Services Supplement at the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering.

Mathilde Landier

Mathilde Landier is a senior teacher development specialist and a published author for French publishing companies specializing in education. She started her career as a language instructor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In France, she spent several years at Radio France Internationale (RFI), where she was in charge of the "langue française" website dedicated to French learning. She also set up radio-based training sessions for teachers of French in more than 20 countries and animated a weekly radio short program about Francophony. While at RFI, she held appointments as media literacy lecturer at Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle. Based in Togo for a few years as a regional coordinator of the Network of Centers for French as a Foreign Language in West Africa, she developed expertise in African education and in teachers' professional development. This allowed her to participate in the building up of distance learning programs for isolated primary school teachers in rural areas of Sub-Saharan countries for international organizations. Mathilde coordinates the French Heritage Language Program in New York City. In addition to administrative management, she develops the French curricula of this program, which is dedicated to young Americans and new immigrants from francophone backgrounds. She is also in charge of supervising the program's regional partnerships, including Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts.

Ana Lúcia Lico

Ana Lúcia Lico was born in Brazil. She holds an MBA in Strategic Management and has an Specialization in Corporate Communications, both done in Brazil. Resident in the US since 2003, Ana Lucia is married to an American, and has a 13-year-old son and a 10-year-old son. She participated in the founding of the Brazilian Mothers Group of the Washington DC area in 2004, in the launch of the educational program for children in 2005, and in the founding of ABRACE (Brazilian Association of Culture and Education) in 2009. In the last 12 years, she has been studying and learning a lot about the field of Heritage Language and Culture by carrying out community leadership projects and workshops for teachers in partnership with Georgetown University and publishing articles and book chapters on the subject. Ana Lúcia is a co-founder and Executive Director of ABRACE, a member of the Citizens' Council of the Brazilian Consulate in Washington, DC, and a member of the Council of Representatives of Brazilians Abroad (CRBE), where she is the Coordinator of Education. In 2016, she received an award from the Brazilian Government in recognition of individuals residing abroad whose performance has made a notable contribution to Brazilian cultural or educational diplomacy.  

Tommy Lu

Tommy Lu, EdD, has been actively gathering and developing programs for Chinese community-based schools for over 20 years. He has served in several positions, such as the principal, vice principal, curriculum director, and teacher of the Chinese School of Delaware; co-chair of the ACTFL Heritage Language SIG; president of ACS (Association of Chinese Schools) and NCACLS (National Council of Association of Chinese Language Schools); Chinese language representative for the National Coalition of Community-Based Language Schools; and senior advisor to CELIN (Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network) @ Asia Society. He is interested in building a platform for all community-based schools using the community of practice (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder) approach so that every community member can share and collaborate what they have learned and improve teaching and learning.

Marta McCabe

Marta McCabe, PhD, is Founder and Director of the Czech and Slovak School of North Carolina. She also serves as an EFL Instructor at Durham Technical Community College and as a Research Scientist at the School of Education at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Her research examines the intersection of education, language, and migration, while focusing specifically on the linguistic, social, and cultural adaptation of second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe. She has published on the topic of heritage language education in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and in a Handbook on Heritage Language Education. She also contributed a chapter to a recent book, Immigration and Education in North Carolina: The Challenges and Responses in a New Gateway State.  

Gaila Urbonaitė

Gailutė Urbonaitė – Narkevičienė (Gaila Narkeviciene) received her Masters degree in Linguistics from the University of Vilnius and later taught Lithuanian as a foreign language in the Department of Lithuanian Studies, where she was actively researching the language acquisition of Lithuanian children. Since 2011, she has served as principal of the Boston Lithuanian School, and she has over 25 years of teaching experience. In the past, she belonged to the Lithuanian Education Council of the Lithuanian- American Community. She has published a Lithuanian Practical Dictionary (2013) and co-authored Lietuvių kalbos ugdymo programa JAV lituanistinėms savaitgalinėms mokykloms (Lithuanian language teaching curricula for American Lithuanian weekend schools, 2014-2017) and Kalbėkime lietuviškai (Beginner's Lithuanian, 1993). She resides in Danvers, Massachusetts, and continues working on curriculum development as well as creating coordinated teaching materials.
 

Joy Kreeft Peyton

Joy Kreeft Peyton, PhD, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). She was a founding member of the Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage Languages, formerly hosted at CAL. She is co-editor of Heritage Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource (with Donald Ranard and Scott McGinnis) and Handbook of Heritage, Community, and Native American Languages in the United States: Research, Educational Practice, and Policy (with Terrence Wiley, Donna Christian, Sarah Moore, and Na Liu). She has over 35 years of experience in the field of languages, linguistics, and culture in education. She has worked with teachers and teacher trainers in K-12 and adult education programs across the United States and in other countries to improve their instructional practice. Her work includes providing workshops for teachers on developing the academic language and literacy of students learning English as a second language; developing professional development opportunities for teachers working with children and adults learning English; and working in other countries, including the Philippines and Thailand on preparing refugees for life and education in the United States, and in Ethiopia, Nepal, and The Gambia on developing curriculum and materials for teaching students in their mother tongue and the national language. She serves on a number of project and editorial advisory boards focused on improving education and outcomes for students learning a second language. 

Heidi Rex

Dr. Heidi Rex is a teacher at the German Saturday School Boston, Massachusetts. She specializes in teaching heritage learners from middle to high school and conducts the official examination for the German Language Certificate by the German Federal Government. As a linguist, she's had a variety of teaching experience, including German and Ethics at a German high school, and Literature and Media Pedagogics at the Academy for Social Pedagogics in Altdorf, Germany. She thrives to constantly improve her German class by installing new teaching tools in the classroom, which she regularly presents at the conferences of the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association and the German Language School Conference at the German Consulate in New York. Dr. Rex is the author of the "Wörterbuch zum jiddischen Lehnwortschatz in den deutschen Dialekten" (Stern, 2000, Dictionary of the Yiddish Loanwords in the German Dialects) where she researched the mechanisms and steadyness of language contact from the 19th century to the early 20th century of two primarily spoken languages. She has 25 years of teaching experience at the aforementioned schools and the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg as a private lecturer in General and Comparative Linguistics and Computational Linguistics. Besides her teaching and research interests Heidi Rex is also author of three young adult mystery novels (2010, 2013, 2016) in German.

Jane Ross

Jane Ross is an educator with over 40 years' experience in the field of international education, including a long career at the Lycée Français de New York. She is the Founder and President of the French Heritage Language Program, an organization that provides French language instruction and support to Francophone immigrants in the United States. She received her BA from Swarthmore College in 1973, majoring in history and French, her MA from Hunter College in 1980 in English, and is currently a PhD candidate at New York University's Steinhardt School. Her doctoral research focuses on the history of French schools abroad in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the United States. She is the co-author of a number of scholarly papers and book chapters concerning the development of French Heritage Language programs, bilingual and dual language initiatives. 

Ted Supalla

Ted Supalla, PhD, is Professor of Neurology, Linguistics, and Psychology at Georgetown University and director of the Sign Language Research Lab. He has published extensively on the structure of American Sign Language and other sign languages of the world. He served as a consultant to the World Federation of the Deaf, where he participated in publishing a white paper on the status of sign languages around the world. His lab hosts a Historical Sign Language Database (www.hsldb.georgetown.edu) as a resource tool for public use. He is a co-author of Sign Language Archaeology: Understanding Historical Roots of American Sign Language. In addition, Dr. Supalla is developing a massive open online course on the EdX platform entitled, Sign Language Structure, Learning, and Change, to be released in the Fall 2017. He recently became a grandfather and looks forward to passing on ASL as a heritage language to his grandchildren. 

José A. Viana

José A. Viana is Assistant Deputy Secretary and Director of the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). He is the principal adviser to Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, on all matters related to the education of English learners, estimated to be about 10 percent of the total k–12 enrollment nationwide. As head of OELA, Viana administers programs under Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which support high-quality instruction for linguistically and culturally diverse students. The office also supports professional development programs for teachers of English learners. Viana is committed to ensuring improvement in English language education through the Department's initiatives and through realizing OELA's mission and vision, "to provide national leadership in EL education by advancing opportunities for educational excellence and equity for English learners and their families."

Prior to joining the Department, Viana served for eight years as an administrator of the Migrant Education Program for North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction. The mission of that program is to help migrant students and youths meet high academic standards by overcoming obstacles due to frequent moves, educational disruption, cultural and linguistic differences, and health-related problems. During that time, he also served as the vice-chair of the Governing Board for the North Carolina Farmworker Health Program.

Viana began his career in Miami-Dade County Public Schools as an elementary school teacher for English language learners and later was a humanities instructor at an International Baccalaureate World School. The International Baccalaureate Organization aims to develop knowledgeable young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect. Concurrently, he prepared and delivered general teaching skills sessions to Florida International University's undergraduate students receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in education in all levels and content areas. After acquiring his degree in educational leadership in 2006, Viana became an elementary school administrator for Durham (North Carolina) Public Schools, where he established the district-wide Title I Parent Advisement Committee for Hispanics to help ensure that Latino children from low-income families met challenging state academic standards.

He is a second-generation Cuban immigrant, who started his primary school years as an English language learner. The magnificent teachers he encountered in his early learning inspired him to become an educator, and he has devoted his life to improving educational opportunities for minority populations and is honored to serve our nation's English learners and their families. He and his wife, Aimee, the senior executive director for marriage and family life in the Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina, have two children. He finds time in the evenings to prepare high school students from China for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).  

Jing Wei

Jing Wei, PhD, is a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). At CAL, Dr. Wei's work spans both World Languages and Pre-K to 12 ELL assessment. She serves as the Principle Investigator/Director for projects in World Languages and leads initiatives related to the assessment of writing in CAL's language assessment work, particularly in support of WIDA assessments. Prior to joining CAL, Dr. Wei has taught graduate-level courses in language assessment and second language acquisition at NYU and UMCP. Her research has focused on the intersection between language assessment and sociolinguistics, concentrating on the assessment of World Englishes, task-based language teaching and assessment, and language learning strategies. She regularly presents at major conferences in applied linguistics and language testing. She has also published in the Language Assessment Quarterly and CATESOL Journal. Her dissertation was supported by grants from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the International Research Foundation for English Language Education.

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