The Electronic Learning Community (ELC) brings prominent scholar as virtual guest speaker into COE teacher preparation classroom

As part of a series of CASSO grant pilot studies, Dr Pete Farruggio organized an online discussion forum dialogue among several of his EC4 bilingual education students and Dr. Lily Wong Fillmore. The dialogue took place on April 18 – 19, 2008 via the CASSO Research ELC established to provide students with an arena for discussion and reflection about their preparation to become bilingual teachers.

Lily Wong Fillmore is a Professor Emerita of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a linguist and an educator, and a strong proponent of bilingual education. Much of her research, teaching, and writing have focused on issues related to the education of language minority students. She specializes in second language learning and teaching, the education of language minority students, and the socialization of children for learning across cultures.

Over the past 35 years, Dr. Fillmore has conducted studies of Latino, Asian, American Indian, and Eskimo second language learners in school settings. Her research and publications have focused on social and cognitive processes in language learning, on cultural differences in language learning behavior, on sources of variation in learning, and on primary language retention and loss. The government of Spain recently recognized her for her work on behalf of Spanish-speaking children in the United States.

Dr. Fillmore’s recent publications include "What teachers need to know about language," which appeared in the volume What Teachers Need to Know About Language (Center for Applied Linguistics in 2002); “Language in Education” published in Language in the U.S.A. ( E. Finegan and J. R. Rickford, Eds., Cambridge University Press, 2004); and “ELLs and High Stakes Testing: Enabling Students to Make the Grade” with Brian Bielenberg which appeared in Educational Leadership, 2004.

Even after her retirement from teaching, Dr. Fillmore's activism and scholarship continue. She is currently engaged in researching and revitalizing native languages in the United States among Indian tribes. Her work has taken her to Alaska where she is researching "Village English" and academic English in native enclaves.

To prepare his students for the online discussion, Dr Farruggio made several of Professor Fillmore's most recent writings available on his course Blackboard web site. The students used this material to familiarize themselves with Dr. Fillmore's areas of expertise and to pose questions to her. In the discussion, they touched on such topics as primary language loss, bilingual program design, and the multiple roles played by bilingual educators as pedagogues, cultural advocates, and community activists. At one point, several students engaged in a conversation about their own child rearing practices with regard to the cultivation of their children's bilingualism. In general, all of the student participants expressed their gratitude to Professor Fillmore for having enlightened them about key topics that they had not encountered in their EC4 courses.

Dr Farruggio is now preparing to do a data analysis of the discussion, which will include the students' reflections about what they learned from the experience and how they perceive its value to their professional development as bilingual teachers.