Dr. Joan M. Tardibuono is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching program at the USC Rossier School of Education.  While completing her studies in Language, Literacy, and Learning, she was selected by the Center for Multicultural, Multilingual Research for the prestigious U.S. Department of Education Title VII Fellowship. In 2006, her dissertation, A Psychogenetic Analysis of Spanish-Speaking Preschoolers’ Emergent Writing: A developmental trajectory toward the phonetization of speech, was nominated for Dissertation of the Year.  As a researcher for the federally funded Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA), she and a team of researchers from the University of Southern California implemented an early literacy intervention and conducted early literacy research with Spanish-speaking children at Para Los Niños Preschool in downtown Los Angeles. Additionally, she collaborated with faculty from the University of Southern California, as well as Para Los Niños, and the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation to implement and evaluate the effectiveness of an emergent literacy program funded by First 5 California and First 5 Los Angeles at Rainbow Children’s Center, a preschool serving linguistically and culturally diverse children in East Los Angeles.

Dr. Tardibuono’s findings are published in professional journals and chapters and have been presented at numerous conferences as well featured on several newscasts, including Primer Impacto, a Spanish-language television news program broadcast by Univision.  One of her recent publications, co-written with David B. Yaden, Jr., Emergent Writing Development and Second-language Learners appears in Rona Flippo’s Reading Researchers in Search of Common Ground: The Expert Study Revisited. Her latest publication, Interviewing Young Children Using Psycho- and Micro-Genetic Design Methodology to Assess Understandings of Reading and Writing: The Promise and Challenge, appears in the Handbook of Research Methods in Early Childhood Education. This chapter was written in collaboration with current Rossier School of Education faculty member Robert Rueda, former USC professor David B. Yaden, Jr. and several other USC graduates.

Working as a consultant, Dr. Tardibuono co-authored the Executive Summary for Fountas and Pinnell‘s Benchmark Assessment System for Heinemann Publishing and appeared on KCET’s parent education television program, “A Place of Our Own – Los Niños En Su Casa.” She has taught reading methods and multicultural education at California State University, Long Beach, where she also supervised bilingual student teachers. Additionally, she served as the El Camino College Fine Arts Division Faculty Coordinator and coordinated their high school outreach program. Dr. Tardibuono taught Reading Recovery/Descubriendo La Lectura and served as a reading/English language development standards (ELD) specialist and mentor for teachers in the Long Beach Unified School District. Her interests include working with new and experienced teachers to increase multicultural awareness, culturally responsive instruction and English as a New Language methodology in K-12 classrooms. She is dedicated to the areas of emergent literacy and bi-literacy and is an advocate for bilingual education and dual immersion programs.