Chesla Ann Lenkaitis received her Ph.D. from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Before finishing her doctoral work, Dr. Lenkaitis worked as a public high school teacher for over 8 years. She is now an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages at Binghamton University (Binghamton, New York, USA). In the department, she devotes her time to being the language coordinator of the introductory and teaching Spanish courses. Dr. Lenkaitis also has a courtesy joint title in Binghamton’s Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership. Here she is the program coordinator of the Master of Arts in Teaching in French or Spanish Adolescence Education and teaches education courses to prepare future middle and high school French and Spanish teachers. Her research focuses on not only identifying the most effective ways to facilitate the teaching and learning of a second language (L2), but also to pinpoint strategies that should be used in L2 teaching. Her areas of specialty include vocabulary acquisition and technology integration in the L2 classroom. More specifically, she examines the use of virtual exchange and its impact on the L2 learning and teaching, intercultural competence, and global citizenship and awareness.
Shannon M. Hilliker received her PhD at the University at Albany in Curriculum and instruction with a focus on language learning. She has been in the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) field since 1999 where she has taught in both ESL (English as a Second Language) and teacher education. Dr. Hilliker is an Assistant Professor of TESOL at Binghamton University. The courses she focused on include English grammar, linguistics, the use of technology in the classroom as well as supervising student teacher internships. She has done research on rural education including the roles of ESL teachers in these districts with low numbers of ELLs, teacher professional development especially with mainstream teachers that have ELLs in their classrooms, elementary ESL after school programs and their impact on social language development, international student success and third language learners operating in the L2 environment and she has looked at the use of feedback in the ESL and Japanese foreign language classrooms. Her largest body of research focuses on online conversation and culture exchange through virtual exchange for both teacher candidates and L2 English language learners. She specifically wants to ensure that authentic practices are incorporated in all of her teacher education classes which she achieves through virtual exchanges.
Both Drs. Lenkaitis and Hilliker teach in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership and have found common ground not only in the language learning aspect of their expertise, but also their backgrounds in using technology in the classroom. They were both awarded SUNY (State University of New York) COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) faculty fellowships early in their careers that led them to not only see the value of virtual exchange as a way to incorporate authentic practice in their teacher education courses, but also the value for fostering intercultural exchange that is needed among the 21st century learners they teach and mentor. This has prompted them to dedicate much of their research efforts to virtual exchange and setting up partnerships with their international colleagues. They collaborate with countries that include Colombia, Mexico, Poland and student populations of diverse cultures and languages at the university and K-12 levels. Individually and together, Drs. Lenkaitis and Hilliker have published and are working on over 25 publications to share their research on virtual exchange, teacher education and L2 learning and teaching. These include book chapters and articles in scholarly peer-reviewed international journals such as Computer Assisted Language Learning and MEXTESOL Journal. They have also presented at local, state, national, and international conferences such as American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and UNICollaboration’s EVALUATE 2019.