Language, Education and Society

Students who pursue a PhD in Language, Education, and Society (LES) learn in a research-intensive environment studying how language and social processes are related to educational issues. Students and faculty are engaged with issues of language, culture and learning in school and non-school settings and believe that some of the most difficult problems in education and society can be addressed through research and scholarship.

Among the topics we study are:

• Uses of spoken and written language
• Language and literacy development
• Biliteracy and bilingualism in classrooms, families and communities
• Language variation and diversity
• The discourse patterns in classrooms and other educational settings
• The ethnography of language and literacy
• Reading and writing education
• Issues of language, power, and social justice
• Education for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, visually impaired or have other sensory disabilities
• Young children’s uses of language and learning
• Inclusion of students with special needs in classrooms, communities and social institutions
• Theories and methods for researching language in social contexts

Our doctoral program emphasizes working closely with faculty and active engagement in research. Students work with faculty on research projects and they pursue their own research interests with faculty support. The courses prepare students to be scholars, researchers, teacher educators and activists who understand the complexities of language, culture, learning and education. The program is flexible to meet students’ interests and goals and allows doctoral students to specialize their studies.

Program Sub-areas

• Language and Learning in Classroom and Non-Classroom Settings
  Focuses on the close connection between language and learning across the grade levels from preschool through high school and across classroom, community, family, teacher education, and other contexts.

• Bilingualism and Biliteracy
  Focuses on bilingual and biliteracy development and education for children and adolescents in primary and secondary schools. Also address the local and global perspectives on bilingual education policy and practices.

• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
  Focuses on the ways education can be conceptualized to best meet the needs of diverse student populations (pre-school to elementary) within a continually shifting cultural and political global context.

• Language Variation
  Focuses on how the variation in the dialects and languages students speak might influence their education with particular emphasis on understanding the legitimacy and beauty of all language varieties. 

• Education for Students Who Are Visually Impaired
  Focuses on the education of students with visual impairments. Emphasis is placed on academic learning with special attention to science education, instruction that promotes conceptual understanding of academic domains and teacher education and curriculum development.

• Critical Discourse Analysis
  Focuses on the relationship of language and power with specific attention to how language reflects and produces power relationships among people and among people and social institutions. 

• Language Socialization
  Focuses on how people use language for the purpose of socializing others and themselves to particular communities and cultures while simultaneously focusing on how the activities, events, and practices of a community socialize people to that community’s ways of using language.