Jill A. Watson, Ph.D.
St. Olaf College, Minnesota
Associate Professor, English as an Additional Language.
M.A. Middlebury College
Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Description
Jill A. Watson is a career ESL teacher and teacher educator. She has taught at the University of Minnesota, Cornell University, and Hamline University, and is Associate Professor of English as an Additional Language at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, USA. Dr. Watson consults extensively with schools on strengthening English learner service, with a focus on the learning needs of students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). She has served as president of MinneTESOL, co-founded MinneSLIFE, and crafted the SLIFE components of Minnesota’s ground-breaking LEAPS Act, which encoded the first-ever definition of SLIFE in U.S. statute. She served as Special SLIFE consultant to the Minnesota Department of Education, and as expert witness in a federal lawsuit alleging that a large urban school district failed to appropriately educate SLIFE. Her current projects include a forthcoming book on RISA, an oral interaction protocol she created to support SLIFE. Her scholarly publications appear in such outlets as the Routledge Handbook on Second Language Acquisition, Reading & Writing Quarterly, LESLLA, the Modern Language Journal, and The European Journal of Applied Linguistics. She is fluent in English, French, and German, conversant in Spanish, and has studied several other languages, including Somali and Lakota.
