Joanna White
Pensioner
Department: Teaching English as a Second Language
Faculty: Arts and Science
| Phone: | (514) 848-2424 | |
| Email: | joanna.white@concordia.ca |
Expertise:
Second-Language Acquisition, tesl
Language(s) spoken:
English
Professional associations:
PhD
Dr. Joanna White is Associate Professor in the TESL Centre, Department of Education, where she has directed the B.Ed. TESL, TESL Certificate, and the M.A. Applied Linguistics programs. She taught French at the high school level and ESL to adults, and since 1984 has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in second language acquisition, ESL pedagogy, and practice teaching. In her teaching and in her classroom-based research, she is interested in the relationship between classroom practices and second language learning outcomes. With colleagues at Concordia, McGill, l'Université du Québec a` Montréal, and the Universidad de Barcelona, she has recently carried out several large studies in intensive ESL classrooms in elementary schools in Quebec and Spain. These studies have investigated implicit and explicit form-focused instruction, the development and assessment of oral proficiency, and the development of metalinguistic awareness in the learners' first and second languages. Program comparison studies have investigated the effects on learning outcomes of different amounts of instructional time in regular and intensive ESL classes, of different distributions of instructional time across several models of intensive ESL, as well as the pedagogical practices of intensive English second language and French first language teachers.
Dr. White's research has been funded by the Quebec Ministry of Education, the TESOL International Research Fund, the Société pour la promotion de l'enseignement de l'anglais, langue seconde au Québec (PEAQ), and by Concordia University General Research Funds. She presents her research findings regularly at international conferences, some of them listed below.
Dr. White has supervised eight M.A. theses to completion, two others are in progress, and she has served on numerous M.A. and PhD thesis committees. The topics are varied and include form-focused instruction (e.g. textual enhancement), peer corrective feedback, materials design, teacher training, the age factor, motivation, vocabulary, and computers in language learning.