Sally Sieloff Magnan’s on-going work and leadership in foreign languages and foreign language education is exemplary, both in her outstanding teaching and her extensive service to the field; she has had farreaching impact upon the profession through projects, publications, and teaching. Her dedication as editor of the Modern Language Journal since 1994 is notable. She has done impressive work in research, scholarship and pedagogy, bridging the worlds of K-12 and university faculty. Her fellow scholars corroborate that she makes an effort to transform research into practice. She is a teacher who truly impacted students in lasting, profound ways, and they give her rave reviews that illustrate the many ways that she has changed lives. As these future teachers join our field, she will no doubt have further impact on the lives that her former students will touch.

— Charlotte Gifford

Richard G. Baraniuk's research interests lie in the areas of signal and image processing and include compressive sensing (compressed sensing), sensor networks, and pattern recognition and learning. Dr. Baraniuk received a NATO postdoctoral fellowship from NSERC in 1992. In 1999, Dr. Baraniuk launched Connexions, a non-profit publishing project that aims to bring textbooks and learning materials into the Internet Age. Connexions makes high-quality educational content available to anyone, anywhere, anytime for free on the web and at very low cost in print by inviting authors, educators, and learners worldwide to "create, rip, mix, and burn" textbooks, courses, and learning materials from its global open-access repository. Each month, Connexions' free educational materials are used by over 850,000 people from over 200 countries. Connexions is also the open-access content engine for the newly revived Rice University Press. His career apogee was probably opening for Peter Gabriel at TED 2006 (talk). His signal processing materials in Connexions have been viewed over 2.7 million times (as of May 2008). Since 2002, Connexions has been supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, NSF, Rice University, and several friends of Rice. Some recent press on Connexions is available here, including a CNN.com article, NY Times Editorial, and op-ed piece.

Jim P. Gee is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades.

Professor Gee's most recent books deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent book is Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007). Professor Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

Claire Kramsch's area of research is applied linguistics and second language acquisition, as well as language pedagogy. She is the director of the Berkeley Language Center. In 2000 she received both UCBerkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the Distinguished Service Award from the Modern Language Association. In 1998 the Federal Republic of Germany bestowed on her the Goethe Medal in recognition of her work in fostering intercultural dialogue. Her writings deal with various aspects of the acquisition of language in discourse, language and culture, pragmatics, aesthetics, and hermeneutic approaches to language learning. In 1994 her book, Context and Culture in Language Teaching(1993), won the MLA’s Kenneth Mildenberger Prize for Outstanding Research Publication in the Field of Foreign Languages and Literatures. The book is a pioneering attempt to reconceptualize the teaching of foreign languages as the crossing of cultural boundaries. She edited Language Acquisition and Language Socialization: Ecological Perspectives(2002) and Redefining the Boundaries of Language Study(1996), and co-edited Text and Context: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Language Study(1992), a first exploration into the various disciplinary strands that make up the study of a foreign language. Her other books include Language and Culture(1998); Foreign Language Research in Cross-Cultural Perspective(co-editor, 1991); Reden, Mitreden, Dazwischenreden: Managing Conversations in German(1990); Interaction et discours dans la classe de langue(1984); and Discourse Analysis and Second Language Teaching(1981).

Steven L. Thorne, Ph. D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics and affiliated faculty in Communication Arts and Sciences. Thorne also serves as the associate director of the Center for Language Acquisition and as a project co-director and advisor for mediated learning at the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (a National Foreign Language Resource Center) at Penn State. He received an M.A. (in Hindi and Urdu) and Ph.D. (in Education in Language, Literacy, and Culture) from the University of California at Berkeley. His work investigates semiotic mediation with a focus on second and foreign language development and Internet-mediated communicative activity. Specific areas of interest include interpenetrations between historically differentiated systems of activity, the cultures-of-use of Internet communication tools, multiplayer online gaming, intercultural communication, and work on language theory that draws upon cultural-historical activity theory, contextual traditions of language analysis, cognitive linguistics, and usage-based approaches to language development. Increasingly he is thinking about the interface between life activity, learning, and cognitive neuroscience. Over the years he has presented talks, workshops and seminars on a variety of language-related topics including Internet communication and information technologies, intercultural communication, Vygotskian and cultural-historical activity theory, corpus linguistics, additional language learning, and indigenous language revitalization.