JUDITH LANGER
Department Chair
Educational Theory and Practice
Director
Center on English Learning & Achievement
OFFICE: EDUCATION 310
PHONE: (518) 442-5029
FAX: (518) 442-5008
EMAIL: jlanger@uamail.albany.edu
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 Photo: Elena Siebert |
Judith Langer
- Langer is professor of education at the University at Albany, State University of New
York. She specializes in studies of language, literacy and learning. Her research focuses
on how people become highly literate, on how they use reading and writing to learn, and on
what this means for instruction.
Her major works examine the nature of literate thought -- the knowledge students use when
they "make sense" and the ways in which their learning is affected by activities
and interac-tions in the classroom. She has studied reading and writing development, the
ways in which understanding grows over time, how particular literacy contexts affect
language and thought, the effects of literacy instruction on academic learning, and the
contribution of literature to literacy . She is presently studying the professional and
classroom features that accompany English programs where students are "beating the
odds" in literacy. Langer also studies relationships between literate knowledge and
assessment. She has studied the kinds of thought and knowledge invoked by different types
of questions, as well as the inherent tensions between general displays of factual
knowledge and discipline-specific rhetorical structures that mark "knowing"
within particular fields. Related to this work, she has been a long-time consultant to the
National Assessment of Educational Progress, helping to design, interpret, and report its
findings. Langer also serves on many advisory boards and national reform groups involved
in reconceptualizing literacy education.
Langer has published in a wide variety of journals and collections. Her books include Reader
Meets Author/Bridging the Gap; Understanding Reading and Writing Research; Children
Reading and Writing: Structures and Strategies; Language, Literacy, and Culture:
Issues of Society and Schooling; How Writing Shapes Thinking: Studies of Teaching
and Learning; Literature Instruction: A Focus on Student Response, and Literature
Instruction: Practice and Policy. Her latest book is Envisioning Literature:
Literary Understanding and Literature Instruction.
Langer is director of the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA) funded by US
Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). She is also chair of the Department of
Educational Theory and Practice.
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Latest Update: January, 2000
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