Margaret Syzmanski
(Paramount Unified School District)

Margaret H. Szymanski received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her doctoral research focuses on third grade, native Spanish-speaking students' language use patterns in cooperative learning peer groups. She specializes in conversation analytic and interactional sociolinguistic analyses. Currently, she is teaching a bilingual third grade class in urban Los Angeles as well as completing her BCLAD multiple subject teaching credential at CSU-Dominguez Hills.

Michaele E. F. Smith is currently completing her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over her 20 years of teaching English as a foreign, a second, and an academic language, she has developed interests in understanding language in natural contexts, situated thinking and reasoning, learning, and teaching. Her passion for exploring language and interaction led to her interdisciplinary studies in education, cognitive psychology, second language acquisition and pedagogy, and conversation analysis. She is interested in applications of theory to real-world experiences, co-construction of knowledge, technology supported pedagogy and collaboration. She is co-author of Speaking Effectively and Shipyard English.

(University of California, Santa Barbara)

Rebecca Simon has over 20 years teaching experience in bilingual Spanish-English classrooms at the elementary and middle school levels. She has her M.A. in Bilingual Cross Cultural Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has been involved in several doctoral research projects that have focused on her bilingual students' peer group learning activity and her role as a learning facilitator. For the past three years, she has been an educational researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara where her work has maintained the important link between practitioners and researchers.