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Dr. Mora’s career as a biliteracy educator began in Texas where she was an elementary bilingual teacher, a secondary Spanish teacher, and a consultant for the Texas Education Agency’s Region IV Service Center in Houston. She has engaged in scholarship, leadership and teaching as a university teacher educator specializing in preparing teachers for work with culturally and linguistically diverse students in Texas, California, and Mexico. She brings an international perspective to the arena of Spanish language and literacy education. Dr. Mora served as Resident Director of the California State University International Program and Bilingual Teacher Credential Program in Querétaro, Mexico in 2003-2005. While serving the CSU in Mexico, Dr. Mora conducted a comprehensive study of the Mexico National Reading Program reforms with a focus on first grade classrooms with her colleague Diane Taboada.
Dr. Mora has received numerous honors and awards for her activism and scholarship. In 2002, she received the California Association for Bilingual Education Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarly Activity for her MoraModules Website for biliteracy and English language development educators. In 2009, Dr. Mora was recognized with the Promoting Biliteracy Award from the Two-way California Association for Bilingual Education for her strong advocacy for educational equity for language minority students.
In her active retirement, Dr. Mora continues to work as an author of professional books for dual language teachers and as a consulting author with Benchmark Education Company. She maintains her MoraModules Website at moramodules.com. The website includes a Book Companion Website to accompany her textbook Spanish Language Pedagogy for Biliteracy Programs (2016) with Montezuma Publishing. Dr. Mora’s book, co-authored with Silvia Dorta-Duque de Reyes, titled Biliteracy and cross-cultural teaching: A framework for standards-based transfer instruction in dual language programs will be published in January 2025 with Brookes Publishing.
View the resources from her presentation here!
Reaffirming Our Multilingual/Multiliteracies Pedagogical Knowledge Base: Strengthening the Research to Practice Connection
| 1.Reaffirming Our Multilingual/Multiliteracies Pedagogical Knowledge Base (3m 55s) "Research has been very much politicized recently, so we are looking again at that base of research literature that supports effective practices in our field, especially for Multilingual Learners." |
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2. The Research to Practice Connection (5m 59s) "We must look at teaching and learning from multiple academic disciplines...We want to support teachers in articulating that knowledge base [about how children learn to read and write] and in formulating a theoretical orientation that works as a pedagogical toolset." |
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3. The Watershed Metaphor (5m 27s) "We are looking at the Science of Language, not just the Science of Reading. There is a great deal of research on writing... great researchers emphasize that most children learn decoding through writing." |
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4. A Teacher’s theoretical orientation toward literacy (3m 39s) "A teacher’s theoretical orientation toward literacy guides the goals the teacher sets for the classroom reading and writing program." |
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"Second language acquisition and second language proficiency are important elements in literacy and biliteracy learning for different student populations... If we only consider bilingual learners as being homogenous, all alike, we will miss out on a lot of the knowledge that research gives us about how their individual differences and their individual bilingual experiences in the home and in school are influencing their learning." |
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6. Setting Expected Gains: Differential Growth Rates in the Four Language Domains (3m 34s) "There are four language domains and the learning trajectory for each one is quite different... Reclassified students are actually outperforming English-only students." |
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7. Teaching for Transfer: The Role of Syntax in Cueing Meaning (I) (6m 54s) “The subsystems of language can be studied and researched individually, but also in relationship to each other. Some of the cueing systems have fallen out of favor, but we must depend on them all.” |
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8. Teaching for Transfer: The Role of Syntax in Cueing Meaning (II) (3m 17s) “When we are teaching phonological awareness in Spanish, there are five different levels... We are reproducing and communicating the meaning of the word through the orthography of the language.” |
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9. Common Core en Español: A Roadmap to Biliteracy (10m 26s) “There is no one “perfect method” for teaching reading to all children. Teachers, policy makers, researchers, and teacher educators need to recognize that the answer is not in the method but in the teacher.” |
Presentation Citation:
Kerper Mora, J. (2024, October 10). Reaffirming Our Multilingual/Multiliteracies Pedagogical Knowledge Base: Strengthening the Research to Practice Connection [Featured Speaker Presentation] CEEL Featured Speaker Series, Los Angeles, CA, United States.