Rebeca Fernandez Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Writing | Multilingual Student Writing Coordinator

My academic and professional interests center on the language development and academic socialization of linguistic minorities. Early in my career, I taught transitional bilingual education and helped develop bilingual performance-based assessments for large urban school districts. While pursuing my graduate studies, I assisted with research on commercially available reading programs and worked with vocabulary intervention data for bilingual school-aged children. 

I have also worked with nontraditional adult students, developed many contextualized, content-based and English for Specific Purposes courses, and conducted efficacy research on the online professional development of adult English-as-a-second-language teachers.

When appropriate, I prefer a mixed methods approach to research that allows for both granular and generalizable results. Currently, I am collaborating with my colleagues Shireen Campbell and Kyosung Koo on a longitudinal project examining the rhetorical and linguistic development of advanced multilingual writers.

I work closely with multilingual and novice writers at Davidson both as a language specialist and a writing professor. In my teaching of writing overall, I strive to make transparent the often-opaque expectations of American academic writing and to help students draw connections between their own taken-for-granted notions about inquiry and discovery and the argumentative essay.