Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1981, Patton O. Tabors was an elementary school teacher and a childbirth educator. During her doctoral studies she focused on first and second language acquisition in young children. Her qualifying paper and dissertation research, based on 2 years of ethnographic investigation in a nursery school classroom, described the developmental pathway of a group of young children learning English as a second language. She was able to use this information as the basis for the material in One Child, Two Languages: A Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1997). Since 1987, Dr. Tabors was the research coordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development in collaboration with Catherine Snow and David Dickinson. During this time she also directed research related to low-education and low-income mothers reading to their preschool-age children as part of the Manpower Development Research Corporation evaluations of two welfare-to-work projects, New Chance and JOBS, and for the Harvard Language Diversity Project, a subproject of the New England Research Center on Head Start Quality, directed by David Dickinson. Dr. Tabors's latest research, a longitudinal project that was following the language and literacy development of Spanish-speaking children from preschool to second grade, combined her interests in early language and literacy development and second language acquisition in young children.
Mariela M. Pez, Ed.D., is Associate Professor at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College. She has a doctorate in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her primary research interests include bilingualism, children (TM)s language and early literacy development, and early childhood education. Dr. Pez has conducted several longitudinal studies with young bilingual children with funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the Office for Educational Research and Improvement of the U.S. Department of Education. Currently, she is conducting a study investigating practices of exemplary teachers for dual language learners across different early childhood programs (i.e., public, private and Head Start). Dr. Pez is author of numerous articles in top journals and, with Marcelo Surez-Orozco, co-edited
Latinos: Remaking America (University of California Press, 2008).
