Jo Anne Kleifgen

Jo Anne Kleifgen is professor of linguistics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She codirects the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies and is president of the International Linguistic Association. The courses she teaches are in general linguistics, bilingualism, discourse analysis, and new media for language and literacy. Her research has focused on language use in multilingual classrooms and the use of technologies to strengthen bilingualism and biliteracy in Haitian and Latino students and their families. Among her recent scholarly contributions is a forthcoming book titled Communicative Practices at Work: Multimodality and Learning in a High-Tech Firm, which describes her multiple-year study of a multilingual workplace in Silicon Valley, and a book edited with George Bond titled The Languages of Africa and the Diaspora: Educating for Language Awareness (2009). Her articles have been published in book chapters and in journals such as Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Language in Society, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and Reading Research Quarterly. She also serves on editorial boards for a number of scholarly journals. Currently, she is directing a 3-year research project funded by the Institute on Educational Sciences (U.S. Department of Education) on the use of new media to support Latino adolescents’ language and literacy development. She serves on a number of editorial boards and has been a visiting scholar at universities in China and the United States.