About

Paula Golombek is a Clinical Professor of Linguistics at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her areas of interest and research include Teacher Learning in L2, Teacher Education, Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory and Language, Teacher Professional Development, and Language Teacher Narrative Inquiry as Professional Development. She holds a PhD in Speech Communication from The Pennsylvania State University (1995), an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Boston College (1990), an MA in Political Science from Regis College (1986), and a BA in Political Science with a minor in Spanish from Catholic University (1983). Her academic background and research focus on language teaching, teacher development, and sociocultural theories related to language education. For more information, her contact details include email pgolombek@ufl.edu and phone (352) 294-7459, with office hours scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays during the Spring 2023 semester.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Literature
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Pedagogy
• Psychoanalysis
• Linguistics
• Art

Selected publications

• Institutional and Professional Narratives

  The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching · 2025-08-28

  other1st authorCorresponding

  This entry describes how narrative promotes the professional development of pre‐ and in‐service language teachers, especially in terms of the development of their teacher identity. It also discusses the ways in which administrators can incorporate narrative practices into their institutions in intentional ways for the purpose of cultivating teacher development. Concepts that institutions should adopt to support the narrative practices of teachers include narrative knowing, narrative as sense‐making, language teacher knowledge as located and legitimate, and making language teacher knowledge public. Recommended narrative practices include reading, writing, and sharing of teachers' narratives, teacher, learner, and administrator autobiographies and duoethnographies, and various forms of teacher inquiry.

  PublisherDOI

• Language Teacher Educator Expertise: A Vygotskian Sociocultural Frame for Teacher Educator Development 

  Second Language Teacher Education · 2025-11-01

  article

  We take up the issue of what constitutes language teacher educator expertise. We propose a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical (VSCT) informed tripartite frame of innovation, intentionality, and intervention to both document and develop expertise. The frame prompts teacher educators to design context-specific innovations that embody a clear ideal, engage in theoretically grounded reasoning for the choices they make in deliberately and ethically enacting their pedagogy, and empirically examine the consequences of their pedagogy by provoking and tracking transformations in teacher reasoning and pedagogy. We reject a static view of expertise as being a set of individual or context-specific traits, dispositions, or knowledge. Instead, our tripartite frame operationally defines expertise as the praxis-based activities of second language teacher education (SLTE) pedagogy and the transformative impact this pedagogy has on learners of language teaching. We describe two innovations that language teacher educators who engage with VSCT have conducted in different instructional contexts and with different teacher populations. We detail how these language teacher educators took up the tripartite frame as a conceptual tool to motivate the design and enactment of their interventions and provide empirical evidence of the developmental consequences for the language teacher educators and the language teachers/tutors with whom they work. We close by offering significant pedagogical and methodological implications for VSCT-informed praxis-based SLTE pedagogy. This highly theorized practical tripartite frame, we believe, creates a workable tool to imagine, think through, and enact praxis-based SLTE pedagogy while simultaneously creating opportunities for the development of language teacher educator expertise.

  PublisherDOI

• Tiny Talks as an Intentional Mediational Space

  2024-11-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter details the innovation of tiny talks as a mediational space that establishes a social environment in which novice language teachers reflect on and make sense collaboratively of their learning-to-teach experience immediately after teaching, and the teacher educator later listens to their audiotape. Tracing the thinking/feeling together of these teachers as they co-taught and re-taught a 4 ½ week workshop as the internship in an undergraduate TESL certificate, the chapter demonstrates how each teacher revealed their needs, emotions, and teacherly thinking through the distinctive ways they interacted with and oriented to each other. These interactions revealed much about their zone of proximal development (ZPD) activity, how they worked together intersubjectively, and how they shaped each other's development over the course of the two workshops. The teacher educator's ability to listen exclusively at a distance, focused on what the novice teachers revealed about themselves, enhances the reflexivity, sensitivity, and expertise needed for teacher educators to engage in responsive mediation.

  PublisherDOI

• Transformative L2 Teacher Education Innovations

  2024-11-21 · 5 citations

  book
  PublisherDOI

• Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory and Transformative Second Language Teacher Education

  2024-11-21 · 1 citations

  book-chapter

  This introductory chapter provides an overview of the stated aims of this edited collection and accessible definitions of relevant concepts and principles of Vygotskian sociocultural theory (VSCT). These concepts and principles represent the theoretical foundation for the L2 teacher education (SLTE) professional development innovations included in this collection. Overall, the goals of this chapter and edited collection are twofold: (1) to showcase the variety of praxis-oriented pedagogical interventions that L2 teacher educators/researchers who engage with VSCT have yielded across instructional contexts, teacher populations, languages, and borders and (2) to highlight meaningful insights into what it means to adopt and enact a VSCT theoretical perspective in L2 teacher education pedagogy and research through the frames of innovation, intentionality, and intervention.

  PublisherDOI

• Educating Multilingual Students in Rural Schools

  2023-01-31 · 1 citations

  book

  Illuminating issues of diversity at the intersection of rural education and multilingual learners (ML) in the United States, this edited volume brings forth new research that captures the importance of place and rurality in the work of educators who serve multilingual learners and their families. The six chapters in this book demonstrate that education for teachers, leaders and staff, professional development programs, and government-funded projects aimed to improve rural education need to begin with three interrelated, multifaceted principles. The first principle is the need to center place and rurality as essential factors that affect education for all educators, students, and families who live, work, and attend schools in rural communities. Second, educators must humanize multilingual students, their families, and their cultures in ways that go beyond merely acknowledging their presence – they must deeply see and understand the lives and (hi)stories of the multilingual students and families that they serve in their rural schools. Finally, the third principle involves identifying multilingual resources for ML students and their families. Given the persistent inequities in access to resources and opportunities that rural ML students and families face, this last principle requires careful planning, networking, and advocating in ways that can truly effectuate change. Contributors are: Jioanna Carjuzaa, Maria R. Coady, Paula Golombek, Shuzhan Li, Kristin Kline Liu, Nidza V. Marichal, Charity Funfe Tatah Mentan, Kym O’Donnell, Stephanie Oudghiri, Darrell Peterson, Sonja Phillips, Jenelle Reeves and Yi-Chen Wu.

  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion

  2023-03-02

  book-chapterOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2023-03-02

  book-chapterOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Humanizing power of counter-stories: Teachers’ understandings of emergent bilinguals in rural settings

  Teaching and Teacher Education · 2022 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Pedagogy
  PublisherDOI

• Recurrent restorying through language teacher narrative inquiry

  System · 2021-08-03 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Karen E. Johnson

  13 shared

• Karen E. Johnson

  The University of Texas at Austin

  5 shared

• Maria R. Coady

  4 shared

• Nidza Marichal

  3 shared

• Anne Burns

  3 shared

• Cathie Elder

  Swinburne University of Technology

  2 shared

• Jacob Rieker

  2 shared

• Donald Freeman

  2 shared