Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise
Language and social identity
Second language learning and teaching
Narrative analysis

Professional Biography
Dr. Pomerantz began her career teaching Spanish and Latin at the Hudson School in Hoboken, New Jersey. She later taught Spanish to undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania for six years, where she coordinated the department’s elementary and intermediate language programs. In addition to developing numerous language courses, she worked closely with newly arrived graduate students on their teaching portfolios and pedagogical practices. Dr. Pomerantz has also taught English as an additional language in a variety of university settings, focusing primarily on the acquisition of academic literacy. Since 2001, she has been a lecturer at GSE in the TESOL, Intercultural Communication, and Educational Linguistics programs.

Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Pomerantz’s work considers the relationship between language and social identity within both language classrooms and bi/multilingual communities more broadly. Drawing on insights from sociolinguistics, she has examined the everyday interactions that constitute foreign language classrooms in the United States, asking how they might serve to construct certain identity options, social relationships, and ideas about linguistic expertise. Her work documents how learners engaged in these interactions draw on particular linguistic forms and communicative patterns to position themselves and others as successful, competent, and legitimate users of the new language. More recently, she and colleague Dr. Nancy Bell (Washington State University) have investigated how the playful manipulation of these linguistic forms and patterns, particularly in humorous ways, might inform contemporary research on second language acquisition, classroom discourse analysis, and language pedagogy. Moreover, Dr. Pomerantz has also researched the ways in which language learners, and in particular students of Spanish in the United States, make sense of their diverse ethnic affiliations, complex linguistic heritages, and sociolinguistically segregated communities as they encounter the language of instruction outside the classroom. To this end, she has looked closely at how these students use narrative as a way to negotiate their changing linguistic identities and socially stratified worlds. Her analyses of these stories suggest that despite the potential for language instruction to foster greater intergroup communication and understanding, there is much need for approaches to Spanish language education that attend more robustly to issues of sociolinguistic variation, learner identity, and linguistic prejudice. Dr. Pomerantz has presented papers at the American Association of Applied Linguistics, the International Symposium on Bilingualism, the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Language, TESOL, and Penn GSE’s Ethnography Forum. Her latest publications appear in The Modern Language Journal and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies.