Teresa P. Pica

Teresa P. Pica, also known as Tere Pica, is Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, a post she held since 1983 until her death on November 15, 2011". Her areas of expertise include second language acquisition, language curriculum design, approaches to classroom practice, and classroom discourse analysis. Pica is especially well known for her pioneering work in task-based language learning. She has been published widely in established international journals in the field of English as a foreign or second language and applied linguistics.

Early Years

Before entering the field of TESOL, Dr. Pica was a speech and language pathologist. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in three years, graduating in 1982. In 1983, she took over the position of her advisor, Michael Long, who left Penn in 1982.

Students

Dr. Pica's passion in life is teaching and advising students. She is known for never taking summers or sabbatical years off and for always teaching multiple sections of two core courses in the TESOL MSEd program: "EDUC 527: Approaches to Teaching English and Other Modern Languages" and "EDUC 670: Second Language Acquisition". By doing this, she taught and inspired thousands of TESOL Masters Degree seekers from all over the world over her 30 year tenure at Penn GSE.

As a dissertation advisor, Dr. Pica supervised more than 50 doctoral dissertations at Penn and at universities abroad. Some of her best-known advisees include: Catherine Doughty, Jessica Williams, Richard Young, Valerie Jakar, Joanna Labov, and Shannon Sauro.

External links

• Teresa P. Pica's profile at the University of Pennsylvania