The Literacy Research Association is thrilled to announce that Dr. Guadalupe Valdés has been selected by the Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award Committee as the 2022 Distinguished Scholar Award Recipient. The award ceremony and presentation will be held at the 2022 LRA Annual Meeting in Phoenix, AZ, November 29^th – December 3^rd, 2022.

Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Emerita at Stanford University. Much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities.

Valdés has also conducted extensive work on teaching, maintaining and preserving heritage languages among minority populations. Her early publications in this area include edited volumes, journal articles and language textbooks. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Education.

In her presentation, Valdés will draw from long term concerns about the relationship between oral language and beginning reading in the case of Latino English language learners. Informed by current problematizations of language itself in the field of applied linguistics, she will focus on the challenges of curricularizing language in school settings, that is, of formally “teaching” English as a second language to young children. She specifically problematizes language instruction as it takes place in classroom settings and the impact of this practice on minoritized students.

Her books include Bilingualism and testing: A special case of bias (Valdés & Figueroa, Ablex, 1994), Con respeto: Bridging the distance between culturally diverse families and schools (Teachers College Press, 1996), Learning and not Learning English (Teachers College Press, 2001) Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: Young Interpreters of Immigrant Background (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003), Developing minority language resources: The case of Spanish in California (Valdés, Fishman, Chavez & Perez, Multilingual Matters, 2006) and Latino Children Learning English: Steps in the Journey  (Valdés, Capitelli & Alvarez, Teachers College Press, 2010).

Advance registration for the 2022 LRA Annual Conference ends on October 15^th. To register, please visit the LRA website.