Photo by Patrick Montero

Please note that I am now Director of Content and Learning at Canopy Innovations. This site focuses on my academic work from 2011-2021.

I am an applied linguist who specializes in bilingualism, language teaching, and second/later language acquisition, especially in minority language contexts. I have worked closely with Indigenous language educators and activists in the U.S. and Mexico to teach, write, document, and describe languages and to create language resources for learners and communities. I aim for my scholarly work to directly support the language revitalization goals of the community members I work with. I was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College. I have held research positions at the Smithsonian Institution and the Center for Applied Linguistics. I received my doctorate in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 2017.

Research interests:

• Teaching methods for language revitalization, especially the benefits and drawbacks of task-based approaches
• The nature of linguistic input and interaction available to learners in revitalization contexts, how this differs from other language learning settings, and what this means for learning outcomes
• Effects of social factors such as group identity and language ideology on language teaching and learning in revitalization contexts
• Conducting linguistic documentation, analysis, and description in ways that are useful for language revitalization efforts
• Complex laryngeal phonology (tone and phonation) and the representation of these features in writing systems