Heritage Language Resources Hub Development Team
Ian Cheffy
Ian_cheffy@sil.org
Ian Cheffy is a Senior Literacy and Education Consultant with SIL International, the NGO working with communities speaking minority languages to develop appropriate writing systems, so that they can use their languages in written form for their own education and development. SIL is currently involved in 1,350 active language projects in 104 countries (www.sil.org).
Ian and his wife worked in Cameroon for ten years until 1999, before they returned to their home in the UK, where Ian took up a role in literacy training and consulting. His PhD, completed in 2008, explored the meaning of literacy in several languages for people in a small village in Cameroon (Cheffy, 2011, ‘Implications of local literacy practices for literacy programmes in a multilingual community in northern Cameroon,’ Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 41:2). More recently, he conducted research in five African countries on the social and other changes brought about by mother tongue literacy (Trudell and Cheffy, 2019, ‘Local knowledge, global knowledge: The role of local language literacy for lifelong learning in rural African contexts,’ International Review of Education, 65:3).
belma haznedar
Belma Haznedar holds a PhD in Linguistics from Durham University, UK. She is currently a full Professor of Applied Linguistics at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul-Turkey. Dr. Haznedar’s expertise focuses on early childhood bilingualism, with special reference to the acquisition of morphosyntactic properties of successive and simultaneous language acquisition in children. In her recent work, she investigates (i) language teaching to young children; (ii) literacy development in monolingual and bilingual children; (iii) creating online materials for teachers who work with migrant populations (adult and child immigrants with low literacy skills).
Katharine miles
Katharine Miles studied Linguistics at Newcastle University, United Kingdom, and spent a semester at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Alongside her studies, she volunteered with the organisation North East Solidarity and Teaching, where she taught English to refugees and aided them in learning to read for the first time. As part of her work at FlashAcademy, she is currently creating curriculum texts for students learning English as an additional language (EAL pupils) in the UK and is developing an app to help adult learners of English. She assisted Martha Young-Scholten and Joy Kreeft Peyton in editing the book, Teaching Adult Immigrants with Limited Formal Education: Theory, Research and Practice. Her interests include second language acquisition, phonology, and heritage language maintenance.
Fernanda Minuz
Fernanda Minuz has taught Italian at the Johns Hopkins University – SAIS Europe (1977-2016). She has been active in the field of literacy and second language teaching to migrants for over 30 years, as a researcher, teacher trainer, and author. She has participated in national and European projects concentrating mainly in four areas: distance learning; linguistic support for newly arrived migrant children in public schools; language for work and integration into the labour market; teaching language to non-literate and low-literate adults. Presently she is engaged, as expert and coordinator, in the project of the Council of Europe, LASLLIAM - Literacy and Second Language Learning for the Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants, a reference guide (with Jeanne Kuvers, Rola Naeb, Karen Schramm, & Lorenzo Rocca). She authored Italiano L2 e alfabetizzazione in età adulta (2005) and co-authored Italian language for adult migrantsa: Syllabus and descriptors for illiterate, semi-literate, and literate users: From illiteracy to A1 level (with Alessandro Borri, Lorenzo Rocca, & Chiara Sola, 2014).
Joy Kreeft Peyton
Joy Kreeft Peyton, PhD, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). She has been working on issues of heritage language and mother tongue education, and the importance of speakers of those languages having reading materials in them, for over 30 years. She was a founding member of the Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage Languages, hosted at CAL, and is now a leading member of the Coalition for Community-Based Heritage Language Schools. 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 worked in Ethiopia, Nepal, and The Gambia (on projects funded by USAID and the World Bank) to develop educational materials, including leveled readers, in children’s mother tongues, for individual and group reading.
Theresa Wall
Theresa Wall, MA TESL, Hamline University, Minnesota, is an educational consultant specializing in second language and literacy acquisition. She has worked extensively with LESLLA learners, first as an adult ELL teacher and then in her role as a learning support specialist, where she developed interventions to support learners. Theresa led a group of fabulous teacher-writers in the ESL Literacy Readers project with Bow Valley College and is preparing to pilot a biliteracy curriculum framework, where first language literacy comes first in support of second language and literacy learning, with adult migrants in Canada.
Martha Young-Scholten
martha.young-scholten@newcastle.ac.uk
Martha Young-Scholten, PhD, University of Washington, Seattle, is professor of second language acquisition at Newcastle University, England. Since the 1980s, she has conducted research on the generative-linguistics-based L2 acquisition of morphosyntax and phonology, focusing on adults acquiring an additional language (L2) naturalistically. For the last decade, she has been investigating the reading development of immigrant adults with limited home language literacy. She co-directs, with a creative writing colleague, the Simply Cracking Good Stories project on pleasure reading for adult beginners. She participated in the DigLin project and led the EU-Speak project, from 2010 to 2018.