CERLL Faculty

Recent Professional Services and Activities

Alister Cumming was on sabbatical leave from July 2011. During that time he published the results of the ALTUR project as Adolescent Literacies in a Multicultural Context (2012, Routledge) along with Esther Geva and 10 OISE PhD students. He spent most of the autumn on a fellowship at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he provided numerous lectures as well as conferring on research and thesis projects and also gave invited lectures at Tsinghua, Jilin, and Zhejiang Universities in China. Alister gave plenary addresses at conferences for TESOL in Doha, Qatar, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and at the Symposium on Innovations and Challenges for Second Language Pedagogy at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Last spring he presented in and organized symposia at AAAL in Chicago, TESOL in New Orleans, and CCERBAL at the University of Ottawa, and this spring he gave plenary addresses in the Currents for Language Learning symposium at the University of Michigan and in the SLA Graduate Symposium at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. Alister completed in 2011 his terms as Chair of the Social Sciences Panel for the Connaught Committee at the University of Toronto and as Chair of the TOEFL Committee of Examiners at Educational Testing Service as well as serving on its Research Sub-Committee and on the TOEFL Board. He continued as Executive Director for Language Learning, overseeing an extensive granting program, managing the finances of the journal, and organizing their annual Board meeting in Ann Arbor, and this past year, drafting new policies for the journal. Alister serves on the editorial boards of the journals Assessing Writing, Canadian Modern Language Review, Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Second Language Writing, Language Assessment Quarterly, Language Learning, Language Testing, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, TESL Canada Journal, Writing and Pedagogy and of the upcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition. He also serves on a national-level advisory panel of testing experts reviewing and advising on English and French language proficiency tests for immigration decisions at Citizenship and Immigration Canada and on the selection panel for the Ph.D. Fellowship scheme at the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.

Jim Cummins research and scholarly writing has focused on issues related to English language
learners (ELL) and aspects of bilingual development. He has been engaged with several research projects during the year and has also written two scholarly books which have been published. One of these is a synthesis of empirical and theoretical work relating to bilingual students’ academic development which was written specifically for publication in Japan (translated into Japanese by a long-time University of Toronto colleague, Professor Kazuko Nakajima). The other book, entitled Identity texts: The collaborative creation of power in multilingual schools (co-edited with Margaret Early) brings together many of the outcomes of research and theorizing on multiliteracies that Jim has pursued during the past decade and are a central focus of his CRC research. In addition to these two books, Jim co-edited (with Professor Shelley Taylor of the University of Western Ontario) a special issue of the journal Writing and Pedagogy which focuses on the themes of Identity Texts, literacy engagement and multilingual classrooms. He also gave 14 keynote and/or featured presentations at scholarly or professional conferences during the year. These included invited presentations in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Norway and Mexico in addition to Canada and the United States. In September 2011 and March 2013 respectively, Jim received Honorary Lifetime Membership Awards from the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers (CASLT) and the Ontario Modern Language Teachers Association (OMLTA).

Antoinette Gagné is the Academic Coordinator of the OISE Academic and Cultural Support Centre which was established in September 2005 for pre-service and graduate students. She acts as academic advisor for a team of 12 TAs to offer a wide range of services to support students at OISE. Members of the ACSC meet on a monthly basis to discuss pedagogical issues and explore how to best meet the needs of our clients. Several of the services offered by the ACSC were based on strategies suggested by participants in my TESOL funded study as well as inspired by the feedback of internationally educated teacher candidates enrolled at OISE. Antoinette was also involved in the Curriculum Renewal at Playa Ancha University. Her involvement included consultation on 1) curriculum renewal in higher education, 2) the improvement of the student experience, 3) the development, management and implementation of field experiences and field partnerships in the initial preparation of university students in professional programs at Playa Ancha University, Valparaiso and San Felipe, Chile.

Julie Kerekes and her graduate students presented the Internationally Educated Professionals Project (IEPro) research at the American Association of Applied Linguistics and Metropolis. She also presented findings as a guest speaker in University of Hawai’i’s Second Language Studies Lecture Series. Together with three student co-authors, Julie drafted and completed the first article from the IEPro project, which is now in press as a chapter of Discourses of Trust, edited by Chris Candlin & Jonathan Crichton (published by Palgrave Macmillan). She continues to serve on editorial boards for The Open Applied Linguistics Journal and University of Sydney Papers in TESOL; review manuscripts this year for Sociolinguistics Studies, Journal of Applied Linguistics, and Modern Language Journal. Julie also serves on the Board of Directors for Gailey Road Productions.

Enrica Piccardo gave a plenary lecture at the CAUTG (Canadian Association of University teachers of German) conference in Fredericton (NB), was invited to present at a symposium at the CCERBAL conference in Ottawa, at the GERFLINT international conference in London (UK), at the international ECML conference in Graz (Austria) and at a symposium within the international conference “Vers le Plurilinguisme: 20 ans après” in Angers (France). She presented at the ACLA conference in Fredericton, at the ALTE Conference in Kracow (Poland), at the CERLL research colloquium and at the AAAL conference in Boston. In the ECML conference in the Fall, she gave a seminar presenting the books and CD ROMs (in English and in French) she co-authored resulting from the four-year project funded by the Council of Europe she coordinated. The title of the English book is Pathways of Assessment, Learning and Teaching through the CEFR and it is available online (http:ecep.ecml.at). She subsequently was invited to run workshops and give presentations on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) in the Canadian context (CPF, OMLTA, York University YUELI). She also published a book with RK Publishing entitled The CEFR Guide for Canadian Educators. Over the past academic year Enrica has chaired a panel for the adjudication of the Ontario Graduate Scholarships. She has worked in a panel of experts that reviewed the Canadian Language Benchmarks (and their French equivalent Niveaux de compétence linguistique canadiens) both as far as the theoretical framework is concerned and for the redefinition of the specific assessment section. Enrica continues to serve as editorin- chief of the academic journal Synergies Europe and has coordinated the 2011 issue on the adaptability of the CEFR outside the European context together with Aline Germain-Rutherford and Richard Clément. She serves as a reviewer for several academic journals both Canadian (International Journal of Multilingualism, Les cahiers de l’ILOB/OLBI Working Papers, Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, McGill Journal of Education) and European (Synergy, Rumania, and Repères-DORIF, Italy).

Nina Spada travelled to Iran, Spain and the U.S. as an invited plenary speaker at 3 international conferences over the past year. She also gave papers at the AILA conference in Beijing last August and the AAAL conference in Boston in March 2012. Her writing activities include the preparation of the 4th edition of How Languages are Learned published by Oxford University Press. The new edition has undergone substantive revisions, updates and will include a companion website when published next fall. Much writing is also underway as her SSHRC grant comes to an end next year. Several manuscripts are ‘in the works’. Over the past year Nina became involved as a consultant to a research project in Spain investigating the effects of comprehension-based learning in English foreign language classrooms in primary schools. She also assumed her role as co-editor of a new book series entitled Key Concepts for the Language Classroom with Oxford University Press. This includes commissioning and working with authors as they write research-led volumes on a wide range of topics linking theoretical and empirical work in second language learning with classroom practice. Eight volumes are proposed for the series over the next 2-3 years. During this period Nina continued her editorship of the academic book series Language Learning and Language Teaching for John Benjamins and as a member of 3 journal editorial boards

Shelley Stagg Peterson is the founder and chief editor of the Journal of Classroom Research in Literacy, an online peer-reviewed journal featuring classroom-based research. She is also chief editor of Language and Literacy, and has reviewed submissions for The Reading Teacher, Alberta Journal of Educational Research, Research in the Teaching of English, and Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics. This year she was honoured by the International Reading Association membership by being elected as a member of the Board of Directors. She is in the second of a three-year term on the Notable Books for a Global Society committee of the International Reading Association. The nine academics on this committee read approximately 400 books to determine the top 25 notable books for 2011. Shelley presented invited workshops at the Reading Recovery and Early Literacy conference, as well as the Educating for Peace and Justice, Nipissing University Adolescent Literacy, Reaching Higher regional consortium, and Toronto Action Research for Excellence in Teaching conferences in Ontario. She presented a keynote and a workshop at the Adolescent Literacy
Summit in Winnipeg.