Lilly Wong Fillmore (born 1934) is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

. She is

Professor Emerita ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retirement, retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". ...

in the

Graduate School of Education Graduate may refer to: Education * The subject of a graduation, i.e. someone awarded an academic degree ** Alumni, a former student who has either attended or graduated from an institution * High school graduate, someone who has completed high ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. Her research has focused on

second language learning Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process of learning a language other than one's native language (L1). SLA research examines how learners ...

and teaching and on education in language minority communities.

Biography

Wong Fillmore was born in Northern California, the child of immigrant Chinese parents, and grew up in

Watsonville, California Watsonville is a city in Santa Cruz County, California, in the Monterey Bay Area of the Central Coast (California), Central Coast of California. The population was 52,590 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Predominantly Latino and ...

. She attributes her interest in second language education to her own experience of starting school not knowing any English, in a community with many immigrants. Wong Fillmore earned her

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in linguistics from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in 1976 with a dissertation entitled, "The Second Time Around: Cognitive and social strategies in second language acquisition". In 1974, she became assistant dean for student affairs at UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. She began teaching there as an assistant professor two years later and spent her entire career at UC-Berkeley, attaining the position of Jerome A. Hutto Professor of Education before her retirement in 2004. Wong Fillmore has worked on issues related to education of language minority children in the US since the 1950s, when she was a volunteer teacher in a California migrant labor camp. She has conducted several large-scale research projects investigating how children of Asian or Latino background adjust, both linguistically and academically, to the US public school classroom environment. Her research has made contributions to several areas related to

bilingualism Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...

and

: the identification of cognitive and social strategies that children use in acquiring a second language (the topic of her dissertation); sources of variation in second language acquisition (Wong Fillmore 1979, 1983); and the influence of social context and teaching practices on second language acquisition (Wong Fillmore 1985a, b; 1989a, b). Wong Fillmore was married to the American linguist, Charles Fillmore.

Selected publications

Lily Wong Fillmore. 1979. Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition. In ''Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior''. Academic Press, pp. 203–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-255950-1.50017-2 Lily Wong Fillmore. 1983. The Language Learner as an Individual. In M. Clarke and J. Handscombe, Eds. ''Pacific Perspectives on Language Learning and Teaching.'' Washington, D.C.: TESOL. Lily Wong Fillmore. 1985a. When Does Teacher Talk Work as Input? In S. Gass and C. Madden, Eds. ''Input in Second Language Acquisition.''Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Lily Wong Fillmore, P. Ammon, B. McLaughlin and M. S. Ammon 1985b. ''Language Learning through Bilingual Instruction,'' Final Report to the National Institute of Education. University of California, Berkeley. Lily Wong Fillmore. 1989a. Language Learning in Social Context: The View from Research in Second Language learning. In R. Dietrich and C. Graumann, Eds. ''Language Processing in Social Context,'' Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers. Lily Wong Fillmore. 1989b. Teachability and Second Language Acquisition. In R. Schiefelbusch & M. Rice, Eds. ''The Teachability of Language''. Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes. Lily Wong Fillmore. 1991. When learning a second language means losing the first. ''Early Childhood Research Quarterly'' 6, 323-346. Lily Wong Fillmore and Catherine E. Snow. 2000. ''What Teachers Need To Know about Language''. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Research.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fillmore, Lily Wong 1934 births Living people University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Education faculty Linguists from the United States American academics of Chinese descent American women linguists Stanford University alumni