Professor Kleifgen is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a founding member and co-director of the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies at Teachers College and is the recently elected president of the International Linguistic Association.

Professor Kleifgen teaches graduate-level courses in linguistics and education, discourse analysis, bilingualism/biliteracy, and new media for language and literacy. Her inter?national teaching experience spans countries across the Americas and Asia.

She has conducted research on discourse in multilingual classrooms, the language of the Internet, and the use of new technologies to strengthen bilingualism and biliteracy in Haitian and Latino populations. More recently, she concluded a multiple-year study of language practices in a high-tech, multilingual workplace in the Silicon Valley, with particular attention to Latino, Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant workers. A book on this research, Communicative Practices at Work: Multimodality and Learning in a High-Tech Firm, is in preparation. She also has edited a volume (with George C. Bond) entitled The Languages of Africa and the Diaspora: Educating for Language Awareness, forthcoming with Multilingual Matters. Her articles have been published in edited books (e.g., ?Alternative spaces for education with and through technology? with Charles Kinzer) as well as in scholarly journals (such as Text, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Discourse Processes, Language in Society, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and Reading Research Quarterly).

Currently, Professor Kleifgen is involved in a research project with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which is evaluating the uses of new technologies to support the language and literacy development of immigrant students living in the New York area. She has been a visiting scholar at Nanjing University in the People?s Republic of China and Stanford University in the US. She has served as consultant to language and technology programs in both the US and abroad, including China, the Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, Mexico, Panama, Taiwan, and Vietnam.