Joanna White

Personal website
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.