Nancy H. Hornberger

After graduating from Harvard and NYU and living and working for over a decade in Quechua-speaking areas of the Andes, where she also carried out her dissertation research on bilingual education, Dr. Hornberger received her Ph.D. in educational policy studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 and joined the faculty of Penn's Graduate School of Education the same year. She served as Acting Dean of GSE from 1993-1995, held the Goldie Anna chair from 1993-1998, and has directed Educational Linguistics during most of her tenure here. She is also convener of GSE's annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum. Dr. Hornberger is internationally known for her work in bilingualism and biliteracy, language minority education and language policy, indigenous language revitalization, ethnographic research in education, sociolinguistics, and language teaching. She co-edits an international book series on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (Multilingual Matters) and serves or has served on the editorial boards of numerous book series and international journals. She researches, lectures, and consults on multilingual language in education policy and practice in the United States, the Andes (Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador), Brazil, South Africa, and other parts of the world. Most recently, she has been twice awarded Fulbright Senior Specialist grants for lecturing/consulting visits to Paraguay and to New Zealand.

Dr. Hornberger investigates language and education in culturally and linguistically diverse settings, combining methods and perspectives from sociolinguistics, educational anthropology, linguistic anthropology, language planning, and educational policy studies. She gives special attention to educational policy and practice for indigenous and immigrant language groups, compared across national contexts. Current projects include: Literacy in Two Languages (1987-present), a long-term ethnographic school/community study in the Puerto Rican and Cambodian communities of Philadelphia; Quechua Language and Literacy in the Urban Andean Highlands (1987-present), an ethnography of communication in urban contexts of the Andes; and Multilingual Language Policy and Classroom Practice: Comparative Perspectives on Indigenous Language Revitalization (1995-present), a series of case studies based on short-term consultancies and classroom observations in South Africa, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and elsewhere.

Professor Hornberger is author of Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua Case (Mouton, 1988) and editor of Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Research, Policy, and Practice in Multilingual Settings (Multilingual Matters, forthcoming); Indigenous Literacies in the Americas: Language Planning from the Bottom up (Mouton, 1996), Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching (Cambridge, 1996, with S. McKay) and Research Methods in Language and Education (Kluwer, 1997, with D. Corson).