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Thomas Destino
(University of California, Riverside)

After completing a PH. D. in Foreign Language Education at Ohio State and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UC, Santa Cruz, I took an Assistant Professor position at UC, Riverside in 1995. At UCR I teach courses on Second language literacy development, discourse analysis, and a CLAD course, Language Development in the Content areas, in the Teacher Education Department. My research interests closely parallel my teaching interests. I have been involved in several classroom based studies since arriving at UCR. Two studies have been conducted at the high school level. One studied the academic performance of intermediate proficient English learners in homogeneous cooperative groups in a language arts setting. The other has investigated the organization of second language reading in an ESL program, with a specific focus on tracing student's second language reading development. Other studies have been carried out at the elementary level in bilingual settings. One investigated the role the school plays in fourth grader's language shift from the native language (Spanish) to the second language (English). The other study investigated the manner in which two teachers used creative dramatics as an instructional tool in two different second language settings. A project currently under way is investigating the biliteracy development of fourth graders and their parents in a school-based computer literacy program. Emerging from this early work is my developing interest in investigating English language literacy development, mainly reading, in such a way that considers student's bilingual development, home/school language use practices, and the manner in which teachers construct literacy events in the classroom.