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Meena Singhal (Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, The University of Arizona, 1999) has served as both an administrator and instructor in the School of Language Arts at Long Beach City College. She also teaches courses in computer-assisted academic reading and writing in the ESL Department at Long Beach City College. Previously she taught ELL methods courses in the Department of Education at University of California, Irvine and from 1996-2000 she was teaching composition at the University of Arizona. She is currently conducting research in the areas of L2 reading and technology, and the impact of learning communities on ESL students' reading achievement and motivation. She is the Editor of The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal. At present she is also working on a multimedia program designed to improve the academic reading skills of college-level students. Her most recent projects have been Script-O! and Script-O! Pro currently used by over 800 instructors and the organization of the International Conference on Second and Foreign Language Teaching and Research. Her dissertation, The Effects of Reading Strategy Instruction on the Reading Comprehension, Reading Process, and Strategy Use of Adult ESL Learners investigated the effectiveness of a Web-Based Reading Instruction Program to teach reading strategies to college-level ESL students. In particular, it examined how such a program may help ESL students learn and practice reading strategies, and develop the academic reading skills, as well as the necessary skills to interpret literary works they are exposed to in their freshman composition courses, in order to improve their overall reading comprehension, strategy use, and reading efficiency. It also explored the potentials and limitations of using a web-based program for teaching reading strategies.
Before coming to the United States in 1996, she taught with the Calgary Board of Education, Chinook College, Victoria School LINC program, Calgary Immigrant Women's Association, Mount Royal College (Calgary, Canada), and the Creative Language Group (Montreal, Canada). She received a B.A. in English Literature and a B.Ed. from the University of Calgary, and an M.Ed. in Teaching English as a Second Language from McGill University. She is the recipient of a number of awards, the most recent being the Excellence in Teaching Award and Innovative Teaching Practices. She has presented at numerous local, national and international conferences. She has also held workshops on reading instruction, and language teaching and the Internet. Some of her publications including her research on literacy and technology, and second language reading have appeared in Language Teaching and Research, ON-CALL: The Australian Journal of Computers and Language Education, Arizona Reading Journal, ELT News and Views, and Language Learning and Technology.
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