Mary J. Schleppegrell

Schleppegrell received the 2018 Leadership Through Research Award from the Second Language Research Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association.

In addition to her work as both a professor and researcher, Schleppeggrell served as the President of the North American Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (NASFLA) from 2010-2011.

After completing her Ph.D., Schleppegrell joined the faculty of the Linguistics department of University of California, Davis, where she would remain until 2005. During this time, she published the first edition of The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective, a text that advocates for incorporating language-focused instruction into the curriculum of all academic subjects beginning at the middle school level in an effort to support and develop learners' critical literacy skills.

In 2005, Schleppegrell became a Professor of Education at the University of Michigan, where she currently teaches courses on language learning and development, linguistics in education, and SFL. After joining the faculty at the University of Michigan, Schleppegrell published Reading in Secondary Content Areas: A Language-Based Pedagogy with Luciana de Oliveira and Focus on Grammar and Meaning with Zhihui Fang, two books that offer both theoretical explanations and practical approaches for the development of critical literacy in a K-12 setting.

With the publication of her first book, The Language of Schooling, Schleppegrell made an important contribution to the literature on language use in educational contexts. Published in 2004, this book was a timely response to Lily Wong Fillmore and Catherine E. Snow's 2002 suggestion that researchers provide teachers with more explicit knowledge about academic language. Departing from a SFL perspective, Schleppegrell deftly analyzes the different genres of language students encounter in academic settings in order to draw attention to the idea that everyday, spoken discourse differs drastically from the language of academic texts. She contends that students who do not encounter academic language outside of a school setting are considerably less likely to succeed in secondary and tertiary courses as they require advanced literacy skills. In response to this problem, Schleppegrell advocates for explicit language instruction across all academic subjects that provides students with an understanding of how texts create meaning through a combination genre-related conventions and linguistic choices made by the author or speaker.

Schleppegrell received a B.A. in German from the University of Minnesota in 1972 and began her career as an elementary school teacher in California's Elk Grove School District. In 1982, she completed an M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at the American University in Cairo and subsequently taught at the university level in Egypt before returning to the United States where she earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 1989. Schleppegrell's dissertation entitled, "Functions of because in spoken discourse" demonstrates a return to her early career interests as interviews of elementary school students formed the corpus of her research data.

Mary J. Schleppegrell (born October 17, 1950) is an applied linguist and Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. Her research and praxis are based on the principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory derived from the work of social semiotic linguist Michael Halliday. Schleppegrell is known for the SFL-based literacy practices she has continuously helped to develop for multilingual and English language learners throughout her decades long career, which she began as an educational specialist before transitioning to the field of applied linguistics. As a result, her publications demonstrate a deep understanding of both the theories and practices related to teaching and learning.