Saeid Atoofi is a Ph.D. candidate in UCLA's Department of Applied Linguistics. He received his B.A. in psychology in 2003 from UCLA and his M.A. from California State University, Long Beach in psychological research. His main research interests are language socialization among heritage speakers and cultural aspects of Persian language acquisition among second generation Iranian-Americans. Currently he is working on his dissertation, which investigates the communicative resources used in Persian to display affect and how these resources are exploited for socialization and acquisition of a heritage language. He is currently working on developing curricula to allow Persian heritage learners to regain and improve their language competencies. Atoofi is the recipient of several fellowships from UCLA, has published in refereed journals in the field of applied linguistics, and has presented at many national conferences in related disciplines.
Maria Carreira is an Associate Professor of Spanish at California State University at Long Beach. She was the co-organizer of the first national conference on heritage languages (1999). She is the co-author of a first-year textbook for Spanish (2004) and of a book for heritage speakers of Spanish. Her research interests include phonology, Spanish in the U.S., sociolinguistics, heritage languages, and educational linguistics. Carreira designed a curriculum for heritage speakers of Spanish for Westminster High School (Westminster, CA) pursuant to a Department of Education Title VII grant. She is the co-director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center's projects to design a generic curriculum and language-specific materials for heritage language instruction, and a co-author of the preliminary report on the NHLRC's survey of college-level heritage learners.
Hsui-Huei Lin Domizio is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Pedagogy at San Francisco State University. Her research interests include Chinese pedagogy, multimedia-enhanced instruction, testing and assessment in teaching, Chinese as a second/foreign language, textbook compilations, heritage language research, and foreign language education. She is the associate director of the SFSU's Flagship Partner Program and for two summers was an advisor and faculty member for a Startalk teacher training workshop for Chinese heritage language teachers in secondary schools. Prof. Domizio is the editor in chief of several Chinese language textbooks, including a textbook series for middle school learners of Chinese. She has extensive experience in teacher training, program and course evaluation, and frequently presents and publishes on Chinese pedagogy.
Liz Galvin has been teaching world languages for over ten years. Though she currently teaches language teacher education and college level ESL writing courses at UCLA, she has also taught ESL in primary and secondary programs in St. Paul, Minnesota and Riga, Latvia. Additionally, she has taught French in the high school credit program at Concordia Language Villages. Galvin has a Ph.D. in Education from UCLA and an M.Ed. in Teaching Second Languages and Cultures from the University of Minnesota.
Linda Godson is the Coordinator of the Heritage Language Initiative at Portland State University. She received her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of California, San Diego in Linguistics with a focus on heritage language. As a doctoral student she started the first heritage language program at UCSD—in Armenian. That program has now expanded to offer heritage language courses in five languages. Linda also holds an M.A. in TESOL from Portland State University, an M.A. in Christian Education from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.
Iman Hashem is a lecturer in Arabic Language and language pedagogy at California State University, Long Beach. She teaches Arabic at all levels including for heritage learners and has also taught high school heritage learners of Arabic. Her experience encompasses curriculum and materials design for high school and college students of Arabic, including heritage learners, program evaluation, teacher training, and collaboration on nationally coordinated projects. Hashem has led Startalk workshops for Arabic language teachers, is a member of the Advisory Committee and Curriculum Writing Team for Arabic at Concordia Language Villages, and currently works with the Los Angeles United School District on the creation of the first Arabic classes to be offered in the district. She has served on the ACTFL Task Force for Writing K-16 Arabic Language Standards, a joint project of the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the Center for Applied Linguistics, the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, and the National Capital Language Resource Center.
Olga Kagan is a Professor in the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Director of the Title VI National Heritage Language Resource Center and the Center for World languages, UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from the Pushkin Russian Language Institute, Moscow, Russia. Her main research interests are in the field of applied linguistics and include language loss and maintenance by heritage language learners. In the past several years she has been working on developing curricula that would allow heritage learners to regain and improve their language competencies. She is the co-author of seven textbooks, among them a second-year Russian textbook V Puti (Prentice Hall, 1996 and 2005) and a textbook for heritage speakers Russian for Russians, (Slavica Publishers, 2003) that received an award for the Best Contribution to Pedagogy of the American Association of Teachers of Russian and Eastern European Languages (AATSEEL). She is co-editor of the The Teaching and Learning of Slavic Languages and Cultures (Slavica Publishers, 2000) that also received an award for the Best Contribution to Pedagogy of AATSEEL. In 2008 she co-edited a volume Heritage language Education: A New Field Emerging published by Routledge Publishers. Kagan is also co-editor of the Heritage Language Journal.
Gyanam Mahajan is a lecturer in UCLA's Department of Languages and Cultures. She teaches Hindi-Urdu as well as Asian cinema and literature and is the language program coordinator for the department's offerings in South & Southeast Asian languages. Mahajan is the instructor of the summer 2009 UCLA/Startalk Hindi for high school Hindi speakers class.