People

Alberta Gatti.

Alberta Gatti (Director) is the director of the Center for Integrated Language Communities at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Alberta Gatti’s research interests include the areas of literature, literacy, and applied linguistics. In the past, she has worked on on Spanish satire of early modern Spain, and more recently she investigates the writing proficiency development of heritage language learners. Currently, her two fields of expertise are converging as she explores the development of critical literacy in the context of college education. Dr. Gatti is also an experienced higher education administrator, being the director of the Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context (ILETC), a research and resource center for language education at the City University of New York (CUNY). She also directs the Center for Integrated Language Communities (CILC), a National Language Resource Center focusing on the teaching and learning of languages in the context of minority serving institutions and community colleges. Before CILC, she was the director of a multi-year, university-wide Title III initiative at Saint Xavier University in Chicago (SXU). The initiative included projects in three areas: student interventions, technology integration into instruction, and community-based and collaborative learning initiatives. At SXU, she also directed the Foreign Languages Program. Dr. Gatti has a degree in classical studies from Universidad de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and a Ph.D. in Hispanic language and literatures from Boston University (Boston, MA).
Email: agatti@gc.cuny.edu

Syelle Graves (Assistant Director) did her doctoral research in sociolinguistics, focusing on corpus analysis, language change, minority language varieties, and language attitudes. In her early years of doctoral study, she concentrated on language acquisition and semantics, and she is currently interested in language attitudes toward loanwords. She has extensive university teaching experience in linguistics, ESL, public speaking, and expository writing, plus experience working for the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Educational Testing Service (ETS). She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center, and graduated summa cum laude with her B.A. in French. In 2019, she was honored with a SUNY New Paltz 40 Under Forty Alumni award. On the side, she is a contributing author to the Grammar Girl webguide and podcast.
Email: sgraves@gc.cuny.edu

Cristina Lozano Argüelles.

Cristina Lozano Argüelles (Faculty Partner) is an assistant professor of Spanish and translation at the Modern Languages and Literatures department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY). Cristina received her Ph.D. in second language acquisition and bilingualism from Rutgers University (NJ) and her MAT in Spanish from Indiana University (Indianapolis, IN). She has taught Spanish, translation, interpreting, linguistics, and bilingualism. Her research interests lie at the intersection of second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, interpreting, and bilingualism. Her work focuses on the differences between how monolinguals and second language learners (with and without interpreting experience) process language. She’s also interested in making research and language learning accessible to a wider audience, you can follow her on

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bilingualmind
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Crislocrispis
Blog: https://crislozano.substack.com
Email: clozanoarguelles@jjay.cuny.edu

Dr. Tomonori Nagano

Dr. Tomonori Nagano (Faculty Partner) is a professor of Japanese and linguistics at LaGuardia Community College. He received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and his M.A. in TESOL from New York University. His research interests are second language acquisition and Japanese as a heritage language. Dr. Nagano published papers in several journals, including Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Modern Language Journal, and Foreign Language Annals [See Tomonori Nagano’s Publications & GrantsExternal link. for the publication list]. Dr. Nagano teaches all levels of Japanese and introductory courses in linguistics and bilingualism. Dr. Nagano is a certified ACTFL OPI Tester in Japanese.
Email: tnagano@lagcc.cuny.edu

Juwon Jun (Research Assistant and Web Editor) is an associate editor at Wendy’s Subway and programs manager at the Center for the Humanities. She has shown work with Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, RISD Museum, Brooklyn Women’s Film Festival, Les Femmes Underground Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Boston Center for the Arts, National Association of Women Artists, CINEMQ, and more. She holds an M.A. in women’s and gender studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design. Her writing has appeared in offshoot.
Email: jjun@gc.cuny.edu

Coco Fitterman.

Coco Sofia Fitterman (Research Assistant) is a writer and student living in Brooklyn. Her creative work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Provence magazine, among other publications. Her poetry chapbook Say It With Flowers was published by Inpatient Press in 2017, and she is currently earning an M.A. in comparative literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Besides English, she speaks Spanish and German.
Email: cfitterman@gradcenter.cuny.edu

William Oliver (College Assistant) William Oliver is a PhD student in linguistics at SUNY Stony Brook. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from SUNY Binghamton, an Ed.M. in language and literacy from Harvard University, and an M.A. in computational linguistics from CUNY Graduate Center. He also is an adjunct professor in the City College School of Education in its Programs for Bilingual Education and TESOL where he teaches ESL pedagogy and linguistics. Before joining ILETCExternal link., William taught high school English and ESL in Arizona public schools.
Email: woliver@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Former Team Members

  • Alex Funk, Assistant Director
  • Eric Ketcham, Assistant Director
  • Teresa O’Neil, Assistant Director
  • Danielle Wetmore, Administrative Assistant
Cinzia Delfini.

Cinzia Delfini (Project Coordinator) graduated from the master’s program in Italian at the University of Pittsburgh in December of 2017. She previously received her degree in Russian and English languages and literature at the University of Verona, Italy in 1996. After moving to Pittsburgh, she decided to reinvent herself and go back to school. She is interested in pedagogy of teaching languages and cultures through literature. She is currently working on a translation project of a young adult adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, a project which started from her graduation research. In addition, her interests include content-based instructional approaches, especially those centered on contemporary socio-political issues, to enhance her students’ speaking and interactive skills. At present she is a part-time instructor at the University of Pittsburgh and teaches Italian language.
Email: cid5@pitt.edu

Alberta Gatti.

Alberta Gatti (Project Coordinator) is the director of the Center for Integrated Language Communities at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research and teaching has focused on Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as on language education. Before coming to New York, she directed the Foreign Languages Program and the Center for Engaged Learning Environments (CELE) at Saint Xavier University, Chicago. In 2012 she was honored with the Teaching Excellence Award. Alberta Gatti holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic language and literatures from Boston University and a degree in classical studies from the University of Buenos Aires.
Email: agatti@gc.cuny.edu

Chiara Montera.

Chiara Montera (Project Coordinator) holds an MA in Italian from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.A. in history and religious studies from Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, and a certification for teaching Italian as a Second Language from the Università per Stranieri di Siena, Italy. She obtained a doctorate in education at University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation Employing a Genre-based Approach to Teach Written Communication in Italian as a Foreign Language explores the use of a Genre-Based approach applied to writing presentational communication in intermediate classes of Italian. In addition to writing pedagogy, Chiara is interested in FL pedagogy, ungrading and alternative ways of grading, and the creation of digital open education resources (OER) for learners of Italian.
Email: chiara.montera@pitt.edu

Myriam Abdel-Malek.

Myriam Abdel-Malek (Project Consultant) is an Arabic instructor II at the University of Pittsburgh Less- Commonly-Taught-Languages Center in the Department of Linguistics. She has taught and designed syllabi and assessments for Arabic courses at several institutions of higher education. Her research focuses on discourse analysis of Arabic written and spoken texts using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and on investigating SFL genre-based pedagogy for teaching and assessing literacy in Arabic. She was a project coordinator under the Title VI grant with The Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research, 2018- 2022. Myriam’s book on contextualized genre-pedagogy for Arabic spoken and written genres by Routledge is under review.
Email: maa120@pitt.edu

Shinji Kawamitsu (Project Consultant) is an assistant professor at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan. His research interests include systemic functional linguistics (SFL), SFL-informed language teaching and teacher education, critical literacy, and critical discourse analysis. Currently, with the support of the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists (2021-2024), he is developing a workshop aimed at enhancing pre-service Japanese language teachers’ understanding of writing and instruction from an SFL perspective. Shinji Kawamitsu holds a Ph.D. in language, literacy, and culture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 
Email: skawamit@kansaigaidai.ac.jp 

Cristina Lozano Arguelles

Cristina Lozano Argüelles (Project Coordinator) is an assistant professor of Spanish and translation at the Modern Languages and Literatures department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY). Cristina received her Ph.D. in second language acquisition and bilingualism from Rutgers University (NJ) and her MAT in Spanish from Indiana University (Indianapolis, IN). She has taught Spanish, translation, interpreting, linguistics, and bilingualism. Her research interests lie at the intersection of second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, interpreting, and bilingualism. Her work focuses on the differences between how monolinguals and second language learners (with and without interpreting experience) process language. She’s also interested in making research and language learning accessible to a wider audience, you can follow her on

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bilingualmind
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Crislocrispis
Blog: https://crislozano.substack.com
Email: clozanoarguelles@jjay.cuny.edu

Aída Martínez-Gómez (Project Coordinator) (Ph.D. translation and interpreting, University of Alicante, Spain) is associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), where she coordinates the Certificate Program in Legal Translation and Interpreting. Her main areas of research are interpreting and language access in prison settings, non-professional interpreting, child language brokering, and interpreting pedagogy for heritage learners. For several years she has been researching the untapped potential that bilingual youngsters have to bring language justice and equity to our multilingual communities through interpreting. She is continuing this research in the CILC project Heritage Interpreting, aimed at designing practical tools that help instructors better support heritage learners in their interpreting courses.
Email: amartinez-Gomez@jjay.cuny.edu

Alberta Gatti.

Alberta Gatti (Project Coordinator) is the director of the Center for Integrated Language Communities at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research and teaching has focused on Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as on language education. Before coming to New York, she directed the Foreign Languages Program and the Center for Engaged Learning Environments (CELE) at Saint Xavier University, Chicago. In 2012 she was honored with the Teaching Excellence Award. Alberta Gatti holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic language and literatures from Boston University and a degree in classical studies from the University of Buenos Aires.
Email: agatti@gc.cuny.edu

Syelle Graves.

Syelle Graves (Project Coordinator) did her doctoral research in sociolinguistics, focusing on corpus analysis, language change, minority language varieties, and language attitudes. In her early years of doctoral study, she concentrated on language acquisition and semantics, and she is currently interested in language attitudes toward loanwords. She has extensive university teaching experience in linguistics, ESL, public speaking, and expository writing, plus experience working for the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Educational Testing Service (ETS). She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center, and graduated summa cum laude with her B.A. in French. In 2019, she was honored with a SUNY New Paltz 40 Under Forty Alumni award. On the side, she is a contributing author to the Grammar Girl webguide and podcast.
Email: sgraves@gc.cuny.edu

Coming soon

Coming soon

Alexander Funk | Project Coordinator | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Tomonori Nagano | Project Coordinator | LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Danielle Wetmore | Project Coordinator | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Eric Ketcham | Research Assistant | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Raysa Amador | Consultant | Adelphi University

Tommy Lu | Consultant | Delaware Technical and Community College

Max Rodriguez | Consultant | LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

All affiliations are from time at CILC

Alex Elinson | Coordinator | Hunter College, CUNY

Stephanie Love | Research Assistant | Graduate Center, CUNY

Abdulkafi Alibrini | Consultant | Utah State University

Brahim Chakrani | Consultant | Michigan State University

All affiliations are from time at CILC

Valeria Belmonti | Coordinator | College of Staten Island, CUNY

Alberta Gatti | Coordinator | The Graduate Center, CUNY

All affiliations are from time at CILC

Valeria Belmonti | Coordinator | College of Staten Island, CUNY

Aranzazu Borrachero | Faculty Team | Queensborough Community College, CUNY

Wei-Yi Cheng | Faculty Team | Hunter College, CUNY

Pedro Lange Churión | Faculty Team | University of San Francisco

Laura Villa Galán | Faculty Team | Queens College, CUNY

María Jesús Barros García | Faculty Team | Northwestern University

Yun Guo | Faculty Team | University of Mongolia

Katherine Entigar | Research Assistant | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Michael Rolland | Research Assistant | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Alberta Gatti | Consultant | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Sabine Levet | Consultant | The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All affiliations are from time at CILC

Alberta Gatti | Coordinator | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Teresa O’Neill, Coordinator | the Graduate Center, CUNY

Inés Vañó García | Research Assistant | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Charles Raffaele | Research Assistant | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Cynthia Martin | Consultant | University of Maryland

Elvira Swender | Consultant | American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

All affiliations are from time at CILC

Evaluators

Dr. Dahlia Kaufman – The Graduate Center, CUNY 2022-2026
Dr. Elvira Swender – ACTFL (retired) 2022-2026
Dr. David Silvernail – University of Southern Maine 2014-2018

Advisory Board

Dr. Paul Arcario – LaGuardia Community College 2014-2018
Dr. Beth Baron – The Graduate Center 2014-2018
Dr. Der-lin Chao – Hunter College 2014-2018
Dr. Eva Fernandez – Queens College 2014-2018
Dr. Ofelia García – The Graduate Center 2014-2018
Dr. Sabine Levet – Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2014-2018
Dr. William McClure – Queens College & The Graduate Center 2014-2018
Dr. Silvina Montrul – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2014-2018
Dr. Irina Sekerina – College of Staten Island 2014-2018
Dr. Karen Steele – Queensborough Community College 2014-2018
Dr. Olivia Yañez – College Lake County Illinois 2014-2018

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