Richard Donato
Biographic Data
| ID | 1107952 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Donato |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Donato |
| SIGNATURE | DONATO R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1131-7006 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Tucker, G. Richard
For over 40 years, G. Richard Tucker (1942– ) has contributed significantly to research in diverse domains within the field of applied linguistics and has provided inspiring leadership to the profession.
Stories of struggle and resilience: Examining the experiences of two Spanish teachers through history in person
The purpose of this study was to examine the career trajectories of two teachers in the United States and their decision to leave teaching Spanish. Data for the study emerged from the teachers’ narratives about their school‐based experiences and the consequences of those experiences on their decisions to reorient their work in the educational community. We adopted the theoretical framework of history in person to analyze the interactions between …
Interacting with SCOBAs in a Genre-based Approach to Italian as a FL
The purpose of this study is to examine how four adult beginners of Italian as a foreign language used the Schema of a Complete Basis of Action (SCOBA) based on Gal’perin’s pedagogical model during a course of six one-hour lessons. The SCOBA for this course was designed using the Systemic Functional Linguistic concepts of genre and register (field, tenor, and mode) for the typified situation of requesting goods and services during a service encou…
The dramatic rise in the prevalence of overweight and obesity in India: Obesity transition and the looming health care crisis
Looking Past the Indian Calorie Debate: What is Happening to Nutrition Transition in India
We utilise large national household datasets for 1993–1994, 2004–2005 and 2011–2012 to analyse factors influencing changing patterns in per capita calorie consumption in India. Our study findings demonstrate the significance of the disease environment in which people live, with those living in healthy areas having lower calorie consumption than those living in less healthy ones. Calorie intake has been falling in India, but the study findings rev…
Undernutrition among adults in India: The significance of individual-level and contextual factors impacting on the likelihood of underweight across sub-populations
Objective To investigate the extent to which individual-level as well as macro-level contextual factors influence the likelihood of underweight across adult sub-populations in India. Design Population-based cross-sectional survey included in India’s National Health Family Survey conducted in 2005–06. We disaggregated into eight sub-populations. Setting Multistage nationally representative household survey covering 99 % of India’s population. Subj…
Images of past teachers: Present when you teach
Effective Foreign Language Teaching: Broadening the Concept of Content Knowledge
Studies investigating teacher candidate performance on traditional assessments of content knowledge place emphasis on just one of many skills needed to be an effective foreign language teacher; they also fail to explain why many teacher candidates with advanced oral proficiency struggle in the classroom and why some with less advanced language skills perform well. Using both quantitative data from Oral Proficiency Interviews, the Praxis Subject A…
Overweight and obesity in India: Policy issues from an exploratory multi-level analysis
This article analyses a nationally representative household dataset-the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) conducted in 2005 to 2006-to examine factors influencing the prevalence of overweight/obesity in India. The dataset was disaggregated into four sub-population groups-urban and rural females and males-and multi-level logit regression models were used to estimate the impact of particular covariates on the likelihood of overweight/obesity. …
Student Collaboration and Teacher‐Directed Classroom Dynamic Assessment: A Complementary Pairing
This article examines collaboration during small‐group tasks with young language learners studying Spanish. After five days of classroom dynamic assessment (DA) targeting WH‐question formation, students worked in small groups on a collaborative writing task. This research sought to determine whether learners were able to mediate their peers during this task and if so, whether this mediation might be traced back to participation in classroom DA. F…
Guest Editors’ Message
Research on the Integrated Performance Assessment in an Early Foreign Language Learning Program
This article reports on the implementation of the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) in an Early Foreign Language Learning program. The goal of this research was to examine the performance of grade 4 and 5 students of Spanish on the IPA. Performance across the three communicative tasks is described and modifications to IPA procedures based on the needs of the young learner are presented. Comparisons of the performance of monolingual and mult…
Extending transaction cost economics: Towards a synthesised approach for analysing contracting in health care markets with experience from the Australian private sector
Content‐Based Instruction in the Foreign Language Classroom: A Discourse Perspective
Although a substantial amount of professional literature argues for the potential benefits of content‐based instruction, limited research exists on how this type of instruction actually is appropriated, understood, and carried out in practice by foreign language teachers. This study examines the role of two sixth grade Spanish teachers' discursive practices in content‐based instruction, the goals of instruction, and the students' proficiency. Thr…
It's Not “Just a Matter of Time: ” A Response to Rifkin
Literary Discussions and Advanced Speaking Functions: Researching the (Dis) Connection
This study investigated the discourse of class discussion in the advanced undergraduate Spanish literature course. Motivating this study was the need for research to determine how discussion in advanced undergraduate literature courses provides discourse opportunities to students to develop advanced language functions, as defined in the ACTFL Guidelines. Despite claims that literature classes play an additional role in developing language profici…
The economics of child sex-offender rehabilitation programs: Beyond Prentky & Burgess
In a 1990 article in this journal, Prentky and Burgess examined cost-effectiveness of the rehabilitation of child molesters. Their estimates were based on the tangible costs of incarceration and particular recidivism rates. This paper extends those findings by estimating the intangible costs of child sexual abuse and a range of recidivism rates. The result is to focus greater attention on the efficacy of treatment programs and the potential econo…
Foreign Language Learning: The Journey of a Lifetime
When Are They Going to Say “It” Right? Understanding Learner Talk During Pair‐Work Activity
Adopting sociocultural theory as their conceptual framework, the authors set out to study selected features of student discourse of three pairs of third‐semester (i.e., intermediate‐level) learners of Spanish at the university level. Specifically, they wanted to investigate how these selected features, identified in an earlier research project (Brooks and Donato 1994), developed during opportunities to engage in five different but similar jigsaw …
Documenting Growth in a Japanese FLES Program
This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of the second year of a three‐year pilot project to teach Japanese to all students in grades K through 5 at a Pittsburgh elementary school. Quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered From children's performance on various types of language tasks confirms that they have made notable progress in develop ing proficiency in Japanese. Furthermore, the gains we have documented were not limited …
Monitoring and Assessing a Japanese FLES Program: Ambiance and Achievement
This article reports on the third year of an ongoing research project to document and evaluate an innovative foreign language in elementary schools (FLES) program in Japanese for Grades K-5 (N=195). We report 2 strands of research. First, concerned with school and community ambiance, we attempted to describe systematically the attitudes and perceptions of various constituents of this curricular innovation. Second, we investigated the language ach…
Stories and Stances: Cross‐Cultured Encounters with African Folktales
This paper describes a recent initiative to incorporate folktales and legends from francophone West Africa into a college‐level advanced French literary and cultural studies course. Students were asked to keep reading journals to record their reactions to various texts taken from France and francophone West Africa. An analysis of the reading journals shows that critical competencies in Western culture often do not carry over when students encount…
A Multiple Perspectives Analysis of a Japanese FLES Program
This paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of the first year of a three‐year pilot project to teach Japanese to all students in grades K through 5 at a Pittsburgh elementary school. Curriculum development followed ACTFL recommendations for proficiency‐based instruction. End‐of‐year information was collected from learners, parents, the Japanese teacher, and other school teachers. Results of student oral interviews indicat…
Vygotskyan Approaches to Understanding Foreign Language Learner Discourse during Communicative Tasks
L'A. propose une analyse du discours d'etudiants en espagnol engages dans une tâche verbale de resolution de probleme. Il applique une perspective vygotskyenne pour comprendre la nature de certains aspects de leur discours: parler de la tâche, parler du discours, utiliser l'anglais
Discourse perspectives on formal instruction
Formal instruction in the second‐language classroom is generally characterised by two approaches: inductive and deductive presentations. In this paper, it will be argued that formal instruction is not easily reduced to explicit statements about the language or implicit strategies whereby the learner is expected to hypothesise and formulate structures of the language on their own. Rather, formal instruction can involve discursive negotiation resul…
When Are They Going to Say “It” Right? Understanding Learner Talk During Pair‐Work Activity
Adopting sociocultural theory as their conceptual framework, the authors set out to study selected features of student discourse of three pairs of third‐semester (i.e., intermediate‐level) learners of Spanish at the university level. Specifically, they wanted to investigate how these selected features, identified in an earlier research project (Brooks and Donato 1994), developed during opportunities to engage in five different but similar jigsaw …
Vygotskyan Approaches to Understanding Foreign Language Learner Discourse during Communicative Tasks
L'A. propose une analyse du discours d'etudiants en espagnol engages dans une tâche verbale de resolution de probleme. Il applique une perspective vygotskyenne pour comprendre la nature de certains aspects de leur discours: parler de la tâche, parler du discours, utiliser l'anglais
Literary Discussions and Advanced Speaking Functions: Researching the (Dis) Connection
This study investigated the discourse of class discussion in the advanced undergraduate Spanish literature course. Motivating this study was the need for research to determine how discussion in advanced undergraduate literature courses provides discourse opportunities to students to develop advanced language functions, as defined in the ACTFL Guidelines. Despite claims that literature classes play an additional role in developing language profici…
Research on the Integrated Performance Assessment in an Early Foreign Language Learning Program
This article reports on the implementation of the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) in an Early Foreign Language Learning program. The goal of this research was to examine the performance of grade 4 and 5 students of Spanish on the IPA. Performance across the three communicative tasks is described and modifications to IPA procedures based on the needs of the young learner are presented. Comparisons of the performance of monolingual and mult…
Student Collaboration and Teacher‐Directed Classroom Dynamic Assessment: A Complementary Pairing
This article examines collaboration during small‐group tasks with young language learners studying Spanish. After five days of classroom dynamic assessment (DA) targeting WH‐question formation, students worked in small groups on a collaborative writing task. This research sought to determine whether learners were able to mediate their peers during this task and if so, whether this mediation might be traced back to participation in classroom DA. F…
Effective Foreign Language Teaching: Broadening the Concept of Content Knowledge
Studies investigating teacher candidate performance on traditional assessments of content knowledge place emphasis on just one of many skills needed to be an effective foreign language teacher; they also fail to explain why many teacher candidates with advanced oral proficiency struggle in the classroom and why some with less advanced language skills perform well. Using both quantitative data from Oral Proficiency Interviews, the Praxis Subject A…
Content‐Based Instruction in the Foreign Language Classroom: A Discourse Perspective
Although a substantial amount of professional literature argues for the potential benefits of content‐based instruction, limited research exists on how this type of instruction actually is appropriated, understood, and carried out in practice by foreign language teachers. This study examines the role of two sixth grade Spanish teachers' discursive practices in content‐based instruction, the goals of instruction, and the students' proficiency. Thr…
A Multiple Perspectives Analysis of a Japanese FLES Program
This paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of the first year of a three‐year pilot project to teach Japanese to all students in grades K through 5 at a Pittsburgh elementary school. Curriculum development followed ACTFL recommendations for proficiency‐based instruction. End‐of‐year information was collected from learners, parents, the Japanese teacher, and other school teachers. Results of student oral interviews indicat…
Images of past teachers: Present when you teach
Monitoring and Assessing a Japanese FLES Program: Ambiance and Achievement
This article reports on the third year of an ongoing research project to document and evaluate an innovative foreign language in elementary schools (FLES) program in Japanese for Grades K-5 (N=195). We report 2 strands of research. First, concerned with school and community ambiance, we attempted to describe systematically the attitudes and perceptions of various constituents of this curricular innovation. Second, we investigated the language ach…
Guest Editors’ Message
Documenting Growth in a Japanese FLES Program
This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of the second year of a three‐year pilot project to teach Japanese to all students in grades K through 5 at a Pittsburgh elementary school. Quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered From children's performance on various types of language tasks confirms that they have made notable progress in develop ing proficiency in Japanese. Furthermore, the gains we have documented were not limited …
It's Not “Just a Matter of Time: ” A Response to Rifkin
The dramatic rise in the prevalence of overweight and obesity in India: Obesity transition and the looming health care crisis
Extending transaction cost economics: Towards a synthesised approach for analysing contracting in health care markets with experience from the Australian private sector
Stories and Stances: Cross‐Cultured Encounters with African Folktales
This paper describes a recent initiative to incorporate folktales and legends from francophone West Africa into a college‐level advanced French literary and cultural studies course. Students were asked to keep reading journals to record their reactions to various texts taken from France and francophone West Africa. An analysis of the reading journals shows that critical competencies in Western culture often do not carry over when students encount…
Discourse perspectives on formal instruction
Formal instruction in the second‐language classroom is generally characterised by two approaches: inductive and deductive presentations. In this paper, it will be argued that formal instruction is not easily reduced to explicit statements about the language or implicit strategies whereby the learner is expected to hypothesise and formulate structures of the language on their own. Rather, formal instruction can involve discursive negotiation resul…
A Multiple Perspectives Analysis of a Japanese FLES Program
This paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of the first year of a three‐year pilot project to teach Japanese to all students in grades K through 5 at a Pittsburgh elementary school. Curriculum development followed ACTFL recommendations for proficiency‐based instruction. End‐of‐year information was collected from learners, parents, the Japanese teacher, and other school teachers. Results of student oral interviews indicat…
Vygotskyan Approaches to Understanding Foreign Language Learner Discourse during Communicative Tasks
L'A. propose une analyse du discours d'etudiants en espagnol engages dans une tâche verbale de resolution de probleme. Il applique une perspective vygotskyenne pour comprendre la nature de certains aspects de leur discours: parler de la tâche, parler du discours, utiliser l'anglais
Stories and Stances: Cross‐Cultured Encounters with African Folktales
This paper describes a recent initiative to incorporate folktales and legends from francophone West Africa into a college‐level advanced French literary and cultural studies course. Students were asked to keep reading journals to record their reactions to various texts taken from France and francophone West Africa. An analysis of the reading journals shows that critical competencies in Western culture often do not carry over when students encount…
Documenting Growth in a Japanese FLES Program
This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of the second year of a three‐year pilot project to teach Japanese to all students in grades K through 5 at a Pittsburgh elementary school. Quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered From children's performance on various types of language tasks confirms that they have made notable progress in develop ing proficiency in Japanese. Furthermore, the gains we have documented were not limited …
Monitoring and Assessing a Japanese FLES Program: Ambiance and Achievement
This article reports on the third year of an ongoing research project to document and evaluate an innovative foreign language in elementary schools (FLES) program in Japanese for Grades K-5 (N=195). We report 2 strands of research. First, concerned with school and community ambiance, we attempted to describe systematically the attitudes and perceptions of various constituents of this curricular innovation. Second, we investigated the language ach…
When Are They Going to Say “It” Right? Understanding Learner Talk During Pair‐Work Activity
Adopting sociocultural theory as their conceptual framework, the authors set out to study selected features of student discourse of three pairs of third‐semester (i.e., intermediate‐level) learners of Spanish at the university level. Specifically, they wanted to investigate how these selected features, identified in an earlier research project (Brooks and Donato 1994), developed during opportunities to engage in five different but similar jigsaw …
Foreign Language Learning: The Journey of a Lifetime
The economics of child sex-offender rehabilitation programs: Beyond Prentky & Burgess
In a 1990 article in this journal, Prentky and Burgess examined cost-effectiveness of the rehabilitation of child molesters. Their estimates were based on the tangible costs of incarceration and particular recidivism rates. This paper extends those findings by estimating the intangible costs of child sexual abuse and a range of recidivism rates. The result is to focus greater attention on the efficacy of treatment programs and the potential econo…
It's Not “Just a Matter of Time: ” A Response to Rifkin
Literary Discussions and Advanced Speaking Functions: Researching the (Dis) Connection
This study investigated the discourse of class discussion in the advanced undergraduate Spanish literature course. Motivating this study was the need for research to determine how discussion in advanced undergraduate literature courses provides discourse opportunities to students to develop advanced language functions, as defined in the ACTFL Guidelines. Despite claims that literature classes play an additional role in developing language profici…
Content‐Based Instruction in the Foreign Language Classroom: A Discourse Perspective
Although a substantial amount of professional literature argues for the potential benefits of content‐based instruction, limited research exists on how this type of instruction actually is appropriated, understood, and carried out in practice by foreign language teachers. This study examines the role of two sixth grade Spanish teachers' discursive practices in content‐based instruction, the goals of instruction, and the students' proficiency. Thr…
Extending transaction cost economics: Towards a synthesised approach for analysing contracting in health care markets with experience from the Australian private sector
Research on the Integrated Performance Assessment in an Early Foreign Language Learning Program
This article reports on the implementation of the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) in an Early Foreign Language Learning program. The goal of this research was to examine the performance of grade 4 and 5 students of Spanish on the IPA. Performance across the three communicative tasks is described and modifications to IPA procedures based on the needs of the young learner are presented. Comparisons of the performance of monolingual and mult…
Guest Editors’ Message
Student Collaboration and Teacher‐Directed Classroom Dynamic Assessment: A Complementary Pairing
This article examines collaboration during small‐group tasks with young language learners studying Spanish. After five days of classroom dynamic assessment (DA) targeting WH‐question formation, students worked in small groups on a collaborative writing task. This research sought to determine whether learners were able to mediate their peers during this task and if so, whether this mediation might be traced back to participation in classroom DA. F…
Overweight and obesity in India: Policy issues from an exploratory multi-level analysis
This article analyses a nationally representative household dataset-the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) conducted in 2005 to 2006-to examine factors influencing the prevalence of overweight/obesity in India. The dataset was disaggregated into four sub-population groups-urban and rural females and males-and multi-level logit regression models were used to estimate the impact of particular covariates on the likelihood of overweight/obesity. …
Undernutrition among adults in India: The significance of individual-level and contextual factors impacting on the likelihood of underweight across sub-populations
Objective To investigate the extent to which individual-level as well as macro-level contextual factors influence the likelihood of underweight across adult sub-populations in India. Design Population-based cross-sectional survey included in India’s National Health Family Survey conducted in 2005–06. We disaggregated into eight sub-populations. Setting Multistage nationally representative household survey covering 99 % of India’s population. Subj…
Images of past teachers: Present when you teach
Effective Foreign Language Teaching: Broadening the Concept of Content Knowledge
Studies investigating teacher candidate performance on traditional assessments of content knowledge place emphasis on just one of many skills needed to be an effective foreign language teacher; they also fail to explain why many teacher candidates with advanced oral proficiency struggle in the classroom and why some with less advanced language skills perform well. Using both quantitative data from Oral Proficiency Interviews, the Praxis Subject A…
Looking Past the Indian Calorie Debate: What is Happening to Nutrition Transition in India
We utilise large national household datasets for 1993–1994, 2004–2005 and 2011–2012 to analyse factors influencing changing patterns in per capita calorie consumption in India. Our study findings demonstrate the significance of the disease environment in which people live, with those living in healthy areas having lower calorie consumption than those living in less healthy ones. Calorie intake has been falling in India, but the study findings rev…
The dramatic rise in the prevalence of overweight and obesity in India: Obesity transition and the looming health care crisis
Interacting with SCOBAs in a Genre-based Approach to Italian as a FL
The purpose of this study is to examine how four adult beginners of Italian as a foreign language used the Schema of a Complete Basis of Action (SCOBA) based on Gal’perin’s pedagogical model during a course of six one-hour lessons. The SCOBA for this course was designed using the Systemic Functional Linguistic concepts of genre and register (field, tenor, and mode) for the typified situation of requesting goods and services during a service encou…
Stories of struggle and resilience: Examining the experiences of two Spanish teachers through history in person
The purpose of this study was to examine the career trajectories of two teachers in the United States and their decision to leave teaching Spanish. Data for the study emerged from the teachers’ narratives about their school‐based experiences and the consequences of those experiences on their decisions to reorient their work in the educational community. We adopted the theoretical framework of history in person to analyze the interactions between …
Tucker, G. Richard
For over 40 years, G. Richard Tucker (1942– ) has contributed significantly to research in diverse domains within the field of applied linguistics and has provided inspiring leadership to the profession.
Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · Mathematics education (13 works) · Pedagogy (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (10 works) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (9 works) · Foreign language (8 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (6 works)