Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise

Second language acquisition
Language curriculum design
Approaches to classroom practice
Classroom discourse analysis

Professional Biography

Dr. Pica joined the faculty of the Penn Graduate School of Education in 1983. She is currently director of the TESOL program and co-principal investigator of the Chinese Teacher Education program. In previous appointments, she was chair of the Language in Education division, a teacher of English as a Second Language, a speech and language pathologist, and an instructor of public speaking. Dr. Pica works on professional development with the School District of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Department of Education and is an academic advisor to universities in Korea, Spain, and India. She also directs the TESOL Workshop program at local and international levels. Dr. Pica serves on the editorial boards of many of the leading journals of language study, and has held guest lectureships at Temple University, Japan; the University of Sydney; the Federal University of Cuiaba, Brazil; and the TESOL Summer Institute. She has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the Freeman Foundation, the Ivy League Consortium on Language Learning and Teaching, the United States Department of State, and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation. She has also received fellowships and tuition grants from the U.S. Department of Education to support local teachers and doctoral students. Additional recognitions include the Ethel G. Carruth term chair; a University of Pennsylvania Lindback Award; the GSE Teaching Excellence, Women Pioneers, and Alumni Association Helen C. Bailey Awards; an ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Research Award; the 2007 Freeman Award (Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages); and a TESOL Research Award, shared with her students. She has supervised more than 50 Ph.D. dissertations at Penn as well as at universities abroad.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Pica works collaboratively with teachers, administrators, students, and alumni on questions that explore the interface of theory and practice in language learning and teaching. Her current questions address the interface between language learning processses and outcomes and subject matter content learning, as she examines and compares explicit, implicit, and incidental approaches to drawing learners' attention to grammatical features, their communicative applications, and academic functions as they read and discuss subject matter content. Her findings have identified ways in which each approach plays a role in assisting language learning without interrupting content learning, and have been applied to the design, implementation, and dissemination of a collection of classroom activities, research instruments, and templates for replication and customization by teachers and researchers. Replication of Dr. Pica's most recent study, with doctoral student Jiyoon Lee, is underway at a university in Malaysia, under the direction of doctoral alumnus Ismail Shah.