Laura Ascenzi-Moreno

Laura Ascenzi-Moreno is an Assistant Professor and Bilingual Program Coordinator in the Childhood, Bilingual, and Special Education Department at Brooklyn College. She received her doctorate in Urban Education from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2012. Prior to becoming a professor, she was a dual language, bilingual teacher and coach in New York City public schools for more than a decade. She was also an Associate Investigator for the City University of New York New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB) from 2012-16. Her publications can be found in Literacy Research and Instruction, Language and Education, Schools: Studies in Education, and Language Arts.

Ascenzi-Moreno is a bilingual literacy researcher and teacher educator who studies literacy instruction and learning of emergent bilinguals – or students who use two or more languages in their daily lives. Her work is focused on understanding the connection between ideologies and practice and in particular, in examining how monolingual spaces within literacy instruction – such as assessment, guided reading, and the use of mentor texts – can be centered on emergent bilinguals’ multilingual and multimodal practices. Through her research and work with teachers, she also continues to develop and refine how bilingual theories can contribute to an understanding of reading in general.

Her focus in bilingual education is not on the promotion of languages and competencies. While these are important, her research agenda and work in schools is focused on emergent bilinguals’ literacy experiences and how these are related equity. As an applied bilingual researcher and teacher educator, she strives for her research to emerge from questions emerging from practice and contributes back to the field by helping teachers both think about emergent bilinguals in new ways to shape literacy instruction. Therefore, she works to ensure that her research addresses the authentic and urgent needs and concerns of teachers in the field and is relevant to the national community of bilingual scholars. 

Selected Publications

• Ascenzi-Moreno, L.  (July 2018) Emergent Bilingual Readers Through the Lens of Possibility: A Translanguaging Perspective on Formative Reading Assessment.  Language Arts Journal, 95(6). 
• Ascenzi-Moreno, L. & Espinosa, C.M. (2018). “Opening Up Spaces for their Whole Selves:” A Study Group’s Exploration of Translanguaging Practices in Writing.  New York State TESOL Journal. 
• Ascenzi-Moreno, L. (2017). From deficit to diversity: How teachers of recently-arrived emergent bilinguals negotiate ideological and pedagogical change.  Schools: Studies in Education.
•  Ascenzi-Moreno, L.  (2016). An exploration of elementary teachers' views of informal reading inventories in dual language bilingual programs.  Literacy Research and Instruction, Published on-line May 4, 2016.  DOI: 10.1080/19388071.2016.1165318