Susan Hingle, Bridges Project Coordinator

Susan Hingle is the new Project Coordinator of Bridges: Children, Languages, World. She has a Master's degree in Public Affairs from IU's School of Public and Environmental Affairs, with a concentration in International Development Management and a geographical interest in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to graduate school, she volunteered teaching English at the Pommern Secondary School in Tanzania; she was a team leader for Global Volunteers. Susan has studied French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Swahili and recently worked in the field of public health and disaster management.
 

Vesna Dimitrieska , Bridges Language Coordinator

Vesna Dimitrieska, the new Language Coordinator of Bridges: Children, Languages, World, is a PhD student in the IU School of Education's Department of Literacy, Culture and Language Education. She most recently was Academic Deputy Director for the Language Center at South- East European University in Macedonia guiding curriculum development for English, Macedonian and Albanian languages. She has twelve- year experience of teaching General English, ESP and EAP to both children and adults. As a CELTA tutor and British Council teacher trainer, she has trained pre- service and in- service teachers in China, Turkey and Macedonia. Her research interests include sociolinguistic competence of second/ foreign language learners as well as professional development of in- service language teachers.
 

Emilija Zlatkovska, Volunteer Language Consultant

Emilija Zlatkovska, with a recent doctoral degree from the IU School of Education's Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, will still be a volunteer Language Consultant for the Alef Ba and Ya Ya classes at MCPL. She worked for UNICEF and followed a play-based curriculum to teach English to children. She taught EFL to college level students in Macedonia and Japan and taught the teaching methods class as well as CALL to pre-service teachers in Macedonia. Emilija's dissertation focuses on incorporating technology in teaching English as a foreign language with the hope that this approach will be incorporated as part of the pre-service teacher candidates training. She also conducted research on the influence of cartoons on children for learning English as a foreign language and will continue doing research with young children and languages in future. We appreciate Emi's insightfulness in assessing lessons and look forward to her continued involvement with Bridges: Children, Languages, World.
 

Dr. Martha Nyikos, Bridges Director of Pedagogy

Martha Nyikos is Director of World Languages and the English as a Second Language (ESL) Teacher Education Program at Indiana University. Serving on Indiana state standards committees and as past president of Indiana Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, her interests in language learning and non-Indo-European language pedagogy led to a specialization in language teacher education, curriculum development, and learner-centered instruction. Bilingual in Hungarian-English, she has taught high school and college German and has designed online methodology courses, including Materials and Curriculum Development, Advanced Study of Foreign Language Teaching, Teaching Languages to Young Learners, and Practicum in Language Teaching. Since 2001, Martha has taught Strategies-Based Instruction courses for the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition Summer Institute, University of Minnesota. She has provided professional development workshops and institutes for teachers and curriculum developers for organizations such as the US Department of State, Central States, American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in countries such as Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Hungary, Malaysia, Mali, China, the Russian Far East, and Thailand. She is engaged in grassroots community-based language partnerships through the Bridges Program and is pedagogical advisor for several Title VI centers. Having served on the editorial board of The Modern Language Journal, Martha's research interests includes second language learning strategies, heritage language development in new linguistic environments, and parental-child agency in the project: Language Maintenance Narratives Online.
 

Naomi Kathryn Spector, Bridges Project Founder

Naomi Spector, community advocate and advanced doctoral student in Arabic Literature, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Indiana University founded the IU-Bloomington Bridges Program in 2005. "Bridges: Children, Languages, World", a community-based program for children, began as Alef Ba. Specializing in Less-Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) instruction for preschool environments, Spector brokered the establishment of nine classrooms (pre-K to grade 8) featuring Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Mongolian, Russian, and Swahili. Naomi designed the Bridges methodology (emphasizing child- and site-responsive programming) and directly oversaw on-site teacher development. Naomi has studied seven world languages, including Arabic (concentration), Persian, Hebrew, Japanese, and Wolof. Accepted for Arabic at Middlebury and Alchawayn Universities in 2007 for language, she elected to study in North Africa. Informally, Naomi designed and implemented bilingual Japanese and Spanish language programs in Danville, Illinois and Chicago, Illinois starting 1991. She has taught intensive writing for Arabic poetry at IU-Bloomington; was Research Assistant for faculty of Latino and Caribbean Literatures, University of Illinois, Chicago; GED preparation specialist for Malcolm-X College, Chicago, Illinois; and volunteered for Chicago-based ESL Volunteers of America. Naomi is currently Vice President for Indiana Network for Early Language Learning.