We are pleased to announce that Dr. Laura Sicola will present during the Friday session of MIDTESOL 2013. Dr. Laura Sicola is a lecturer at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, where she oversees the fieldwork component of the Masters in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) program and lectures on second-language acquisition pedagogy and theory.
She has also been an English/ESL (English as a second language) and EFL (English as a foreign language) teacher and curriculum designer for the University of Pennsylvania, for the US Job Corps, for the Nagoya City Board of Education and a public high school in Nagoya, Japan, and in a bilingual elementary school in south-central Los Angeles.
Dr. Sicola has provided technical assistance to schools and districts in 12 states, and trained pre-service bilingual and ESL teachers through the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows. She has also developed and delivered Business English and cross-cultural training programs for organizations such as IBM and JP Morgan/Chase, and for global events such as the Global Entrepreneurship Week in Cairo, Egypt.
She received her PhD in educational linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in multicultural education and multiple-subject teaching credential from California State University, and a BA in international studies from American University. She has
given keynote addresses at TexTESOL and Penn TESOL East, as well as invited and other presentations at a variety of international conferences such as TESOL (New York, Boston, Philadelphia), Japan-US Teacher Education Consortium (Japan,) the Association for Language Awareness (Spain,) Task-Based Language Teaching (Hawaii,) and the Linguistic Academy University of Duisberg (Germany). She has published several books and articles on her primary research areas of cognitive processing in second/foreign language acquisition, phonology, and linguistic culture shock.
