Susan Bauckus is a Staff Research Associate at the UCLA Center for World Languages and NHLRC. She is the managing editor of the Heritage Language Journal and was a co-editor of Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging (Routledge, 2008). She has taught Russian language at the college level to heritage and non-heritage students, and is an expert in tracking down and utilizing data on the U.S. Census Bureau website.
María Carreira is a professor of Spanish at California State University, 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 two of the National Heritage Language Resource Center's projects: designing a generic curriculum and creating language-specific materials for heritage language instruction. She is also a co-author of the preliminary report on the NHLRC's survey of college-level heritage learners.
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.
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 from the American Association of Teachers of Russian and Eastern European Languages (AATSEEL). She is co-editor of Teaching and Learning of Slavic Languages and Cultures (Slavica Publishers, 2000) that also received an award for the Best Contribution to Pedagogy from AATSEEL. In 2008 she co-edited the volume Heritage language Education: A New Field Emerging (Routledge). Kagan is also co-editor of the Heritage Language Journal.
Maria Ortenberg has an M.A. in teaching foreign languages from St. Petersburg Pedagogical University, Russia. She is an associate professor and serves as a GLOSS (Global Language Online Support System) academic specialist for the Curriculum Development Department at the Defense Language Institute (DLI), Monterey, CA. Over a span of 21 years at the DLI Ortenberg has worked as a teacher of Russian, team coordinator for the Russian basic course and for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's advanced Russian course, diagnostic assessment specialist, OPI tester, video-teletraining specialist, text typology specialist, and teacher trainer. Currently Ortenberg conducts on-line developer training workshops and is in charge of the methodological aspect of the internet interactive lessons produced by the DLI and Ft. Lewis GLOSS teams in more than 30 languages.
Brandon Zaslow serves as director of the Los Angeles Area Site of the California Foreign Language Project, funded by the California legislature to serve teachers of commonly and less commonly taught languages, heritage and native speakers, and English language learners. The site partners with districts and other educational institutions to provide technical assistance, tailored professional development and on-site coaching and mentoring. At the state level, Zaslow was a key member of the writing team of California's Classroom Oral Competency Interview, Classroom Writing Competency Assessment, and Classroom Receptive Competency Matrix. In addition, he was contributor and consultant to the Golden State Examination in Spanish, the LAUSD Equivalency Examination for Spanish Speakers, and the 2003 Foreign Language Framework for California Public Schools. Recently, he chaired the writing committee of the 2009 World Language Content Standards for California Public Schools. Brandon received California's Outstanding Teacher Award in 1996, the National Textbook Company Award for Leadership in Education in 2000, and a Distinguished Service Award for Contributions to World Language and Culture Education in 2009. He was also named California Language Teacher of the Year in 2000. At the national level, Mr. Zaslow is part of the author team of Entre Mundos (Prentice Hall, 1996, 2004, 2012), a program in Spanish for Spanish speakers, and Invitaciones (Vista Higher Learning, 2000, 2004, 2010), a parallel program for non-natives. For over two decades, he has presented the results of his work at local, state, regional and national conferences in the following areas: standards-based and framework-aligned language instruction, proficiency-oriented programs for receptive bilinguals, heritage and native speakers, competency-based assessment, diversity sensitive education, the teacher-teaching teacher model of professional development, systems theory, school reform, and models for the development of teach