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Francis Troyan

Francis  Troyan

Francis Troyan

Faculty Member at School of Teaching and Learning

troyan.14@osu.edu

Areas of Expertise

  • World Language Teacher Education
  • Bilingual, Multilingual, and Plurilingual Education
  • Performance and language assessment

Education

  • Ph.D., Foreign Language Education, University of Pittsburgh, 2013
  • M.A., Teaching French Language, Literature and Culture, University of Pittsburgh, 2001
  • B.S., Elementary Education, University of Pittsburgh, 1998

Francis John Troyan is Associate Professor of World Language Education, Director of the Online Graduate Certificate Program in Core Practices in World Language Education, faculty advisor for the B.S.Ed. and M.Ed. Programs in World Language Education, and faculty lead for the OSU-Fulbright Germany Seminar on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Education. My interest in language use, language learning, and learning teaching grew out of my Sundays learning Polish with my grandparents. Based on these experiences, my passion for language, language use, and language ideologies developed.

In my work, I examine why, how, for what purposes, and in which situations students learn and teacher teach in world language classroom and other multilingual contexts. My research has evolved from being framed within a traditional foreign language education perspective to one that views language use as dynamic, emergent, and responsive to a particular sociocultural situation.

My current research in language immersion classrooms in the United States and multilingual education in France is informed by translanguaging, a theory of dynamic bilingualism (e.g., GarcĂ­a, 2009), and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), a theory of language that describes how written and spoken language functions in social contexts and for particular purposes. Using these theoretical perspectives, I investigate how teachers use language and students learn to use language in meaningful communicative contexts in immersion classrooms and traditional world language classrooms.