Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1981, Patton O. Tabors was an elementary school teacher and a childbirth educator. During her doctoral studies she focused on first and second language acquisition in young children. Her qualifying paper and dissertation research, based on 2 years of ethnographic investigation in a nursery school classroom, described the developmental pathway of a group of young children learning English as a second language. She was able to use this information as the basis for the material in One Child, Two Languages: A Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1997). Since 1987, Dr. Tabors was the research coordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development in collaboration with Catherine Snow and David Dickinson. During this time she also directed research related to low-education and low-income mothers reading to their preschool-age children as part of the Manpower Development Research Corporation evaluations of two welfare-to-work projects, New Chance and JOBS, and for the Harvard Language Diversity Project, a subproject of the New England Research Center on Head Start Quality, directed by David Dickinson. Dr. Tabors's latest research, a longitudinal project that was following the language and literacy development of Spanish-speaking children from preschool to second grade, combined her interests in early language and literacy development and second language acquisition in young children.
Dr. Snow is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her doctorate in psychology from McGill University and worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include children's language development as influenced by interaction with adults in home and preschool settings, literacy development as related to language skills and as influenced by home and school factors, and issues related to the acquisition of English oral and literacy skills by language minority children. She has co-authored books on language development (e.g., Pragmatic Development: Essays in Developmental Science, co-authored with Anat Ninio [Westview Press, 1996]) and on literacy development (e.g., Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy, co-authored with Wendy S. Barnes, Lowry Hemphill, Jean Chandler, and Irene F. Goodman [iUniverse.com, 2000]) and has published widely on these topics in refereed journals and edited volumes. Dr. Snow's contributions to the field include serving on several journal editorial boards, as co-director of the Child Language Data Exchange System for several years, and as editor of Applied Psycholinguistics. She served as a board member at the Center for Applied Linguistics and was a member of the National Research Council Committee on Establishing a Research Agenda on Schooling for Language Minority Children. She also chaired the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which produced a report that has been widely adopted as a basis for reform of reading instruction and professional development. She currently serves on the NRC's Council for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education and is President of the American Educational Research Association. A member of the National Academy of Education, Dr. Snow has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge, England, Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, and The Institute of Advanced Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has guest taught at Universidad Central de Caracas in Venezuela, El Colegio de Mexico, Odense University in Denmark, and several institutions in The Netherlands.
Mariela M. Páez, Ed.D., is Associate Professor at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College. She has a doctorate in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her primary research interests include bilingualism, children’s language and early literacy development, and early childhood education. Dr. Páez has conducted several longitudinal studies with young bilingual children with funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the Office for Educational Research and Improvement of the U.S. Department of Education. Currently, she is conducting a study investigating practices of exemplary teachers for dual language learners across different early childhood programs (i.e., public, private and Head Start). Dr. Páez is author of numerous articles in top journals and, with Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, co-edited
Latinos: Remaking America (University of California Press, 2008).
