Hornberger, Nancy (1951-)

Nancy Hornberger is a renowned professor and the director of the Educational Linguistics Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She was born in Kentfield, California, on December 1, 1951, and completed her undergraduate education at Harvard University. In 1973, she earned an MA in bilingual education from New York University. Hornberger was awarded her doctorate in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied the use of Quechua and Spanish in schools in areas in the Andes. This entry describes her research and career.

Hornberger has developed a substantial body of work that informs studies in bilingualism, biliteracy, language minority education, language policies, indigenous language revi-talization, ethnographic research in education, sociolin-guistics, and language teaching. Her meticulous research has earned her an international and national reputation. She has contributed greatly to the field of bilingual education in national and international landscapes through her extensive publications in her areas of expertise. From an ethnographic perspective, she explores the development of biliteracy in bilingual contexts and the implications for planning and implementing language policies.

Hornberger has written more than a hundred scholarly chapters, articles, and book reviews; she has also coedited an international book series on bilingualism and bilingual education. She is the general editor of a 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Education, now in its second edition, and serves on several prestigious editorial boards including the Executive Committee of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, the Spindler Award Committee of the Council on Anthropology, the Education Committee of the American Anthropological Association, and as Division G program cochair of the American Educational Research Association, among others. Since 2000, Hornberger has served as the convener for the annual Ethnography Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. The forum invites a wide range of scholars, teachers, and administrators from urban areas and gives them an opportunity to examine learning, teaching, and administrative relationships between academic and public interests.

Hornberger's research studies draw from anthropology, sociolinguistics, language policies, and bilingualism. Her work provides a critical lens for schools and educators to better understand the complex nature of bilingualism, bilingual education, and language policies in multilingual societies. She examines the power relations between bilingual speakers of majority and minority languages and explores how language policies may influence the education of language minority populations. [Page 368]Since 1989, she has studied the interrelationships between biliteracy in context, biliteracy in the individual, and biliteracy media. In the early work “Continua of Biliteracy,” published in the Review of Educational Research, she explains and defines the continua or the framework as relationships and intersecting variables that may influence the development of biliteracy by focusing on the role of the bilingual as an individual, classroom, community, or society. In 1992, she contrasted the “continua of biliterate contexts,” and the “continua of biliterate media,” studying Puerto Rican and Cambodian students in two programs in Philadelphia. In a later article, Hornberger and Ellen Skilton-Sylvester maintained that teaching biliteracy cannot occur without considering the relationship between the different aspects described in the continua model: for example, the intersection between languages and literacies with diverse linguistic structures, and different context influences at the micro or macro social levels. Hornberger has engaged other researchers and collaborators both in the United States and abroad to investigate the complexities of developing biliteracy.

...