May George

May George holds a doctoral degree in education from the University of Arizona with a focus on bilingual education. After receiving her doctorate, she held two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships, an Andrew Mellon Fellowship and a Fredrick Douglas Fellow, to support her continued research on bilingual education. George has more than 20 years of teaching experience in higher education nationally and internationally. She has also worked with the United Nation Missions in Kurdistan, Iraq, to educate women. In addition to being a lecturer, she is also currently the Arabic summer program coordinator and an instructor for the Summer Language Institute at the University of Chicago.

George’s research interests center on classroom pedagogy, new trends in foreign language teaching in relation to area studies, and communicative approach in relation to technology use. Her research in bilingual education is related to the pedagogy of acquiring a second language, focusing on intentions, culture and profession. She also examines how the process of teaching happens in actual classroom settings and explores the role of inference in students’ learning as well as the cognitive processes involved. She has also conducted research on classroom tension and student behaviors in relation to new tasks to which they are exposed during the teaching process.

She has presented her research at professional meetings in the United States and Europe. Her findings have appeared in peer-reviewed articles focusing on classroom pedagogy, teacher scaffolding, teacher interactions and classroom interruptions, and research on inference and learning processes.

George is the recipient of a number of grants and scholarships, including Qatar Foundation grants for K–16 workshops in Minneapolis; Smith and Mary F. and Maude Miller scholarships through the College of Education at University of Arizona; a Middlebury School scholarship to study French; and a Fulbright scholarship from the U.S. Department of Education.