Biography

Karen E. Johnson is Kirby Professor of Language Learning and Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarship has been devoted to building theory and conducting research on L2 teacher cognition within and for the field of L2 teacher education. Grounded in a Vygotskian sociocultural ‘theory of mind’, her scholarship centers on understanding the learning of L2 teaching, the activity of L2 teaching, and the practices of L2 teacher education.

Additionally, she has argued that the transformative power of teachers engaging in narrative activities lies in its ability to ignite cognitive processes that can foster L2 teacher professional development and, as a result, critical to the design, enactment, and assessment of the consequences of L2 teacher education.

She has published nine scholarly books, the most recent Praxis-oriented Pedagogy for Novice L2 Teacher: Developing Teacher Reasoning (2023, Routledge). At the core of this book lies a unique set of pedagogical concepts: linguistically compact, conceptually rich chunks of language that function as psychological tools for L2 teaching.

In the MA TESL and the Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics degree programs, she teaches courses in Teaching English as a Second Language, Teaching L2 Writing, Communication in Second Language Classrooms, Theory and Research in Language Teacher Education, and Sociocultural Theory and L2 Learning.