Joanna White
Joanna White has been
involved in classroom-based second language acquisition research in
the Québec context for over twenty years. She received a SPEAQ Board
of Director's Award in 1995 for her contributions to Québec Ministry
of Education ESL program development and to teacher training in the
province. Her previous and ongoing research has consistently focused
on ways of maximizing the benefits of instructional time for L2 learners
(ALERT's central goal), across a variety of classroom contexts and language
features. Examples include studies of the effectiveness of different
types of instruction, especially when L1 influence seems to slow down
L2 learning (e.g. Spada, Lightbown & White, 2005; White, 1998, 2008;
White, Muñoz & Collins, 2007; White & Ranta, 2002). Her perspective
on efficient L2 learning includes studies of the positive influence
of pedagogy that draws learners' (White, Horst & Bell, 2008; White
& Horst, 2010) and teachers' (Horst, White & Bell, 2010) attention
to cross-linguistic similarities and differences to promote the learning
of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. In each of her pedagogical
intervention studies, White has developed instructional tasks designed
to speed up learning (for cross-linguistic awareness examples, see
Teaching
materials). In two large program comparison studies, she investigated
the effects on learning of different distributions of the same amount
of instructional time (Collins & White, 2011) and of different total
amounts of time (White & Turner, 2005). Over her career, White and
collaborators have developed and validated many instruments to measure
oral and written comprehension, production, grammar, and vocabulary.