Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise

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

Professional Biography

Teresa Pica joined the faculty of the Penn Graduate School of Education in 1983, and currently serves as professor, TESOL program director, and co-director of the Penn Lauder CIBER Summer Institute. She initiated a professional development project in 1980, which now includes Certificate programs in TESOL, Language Education, and Business Communication for international educators, local teachers, and members of the wider community. In previous appointments, she was chair of the Language in Education division, co-principal investigator of the Chinese Teacher Education program, a teacher of English as a Second Language, a speech and language pathologist, and an instructor of public speaking.

Dr. Pica works with the School District of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Department of Education on issues of policy and practice, and is an academic advisor to universities in Korea, Spain, and India. She also directs the TESOL Workshop program at community and international levels, the TESOL Specialist Program for International Educators, and a two week intensive Program for Professional Studies in TESOL. She serves on the editorial boards of many of the leading journals of language study, and has held guest lectureships at the US Department of Defense Language Institute; Temple University, Japan; the University of Sydney; the Federal University of Cuiaba, Brazil, the University of the Basque Country, 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 (from the 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 research addresses approaches to the integration of language learning and subject content learning in classroom instruction, materials, and curricula. Her studies are carried out in language classes, taught by Master’s and doctoral students, that she offers to participants from the local community. Together with these students, Dr. Pica compares explicit, implicit, and incidental approaches to guiding participants’ to attend 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. They have been applied to the design, implementation, and dissemination of a collection of classroom activities, research instruments, and templates for 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.