Steve Przymus

Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics & Bilingual Education Texas Christian University

  • Fort Worth TX

Dr. Przymus uses applied linguistics to influence positive language ideologies about culturally and linguistically diverse youth.

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Texas Christian University

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Biography

Steve Daniel Przymus, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Bilingual Education and Educational Linguistics at Texas Christian University. His training includes a doctorate in Second Language Acquisition & Teaching (University of Arizona, 2016), being a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer (Dominican Republic, 2003-2005), a Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Grantee (México, 2010), and 28 years of teaching at the middle school, high school, and higher education levels. He researches translanguaging, bilingual special education, sociolinguistics, metonymy in linguistic landscapes, and the education of transnational youth. He is the author of over 30 journal articles and the book: American Education Mythologies: A Remythification of the Public Language of U.S. Schools. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-5622-5

Areas of Expertise

Language Planning & Policy
Assessment in Bilingual Special Education
Bilingual Education Models
Sociolinguistics
Identity
Translanguaging
Linguistic Landscapes

Accomplishments

Richard Ruiz Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Guanajuato, México

2022

TCU College of Education Piper Professor Nominee

2022

Donovan/Patton National Impact Scholar

2017 - 2019

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Education

University of Arizona

Ph.D.

Second Language Acquisition & Teaching

2016

University of Northern Iowa

M.A.

TESOL & Applied Linguistics

2008

University of South Dakota

B.S.Ed.

Spanish Education

1996

Affiliations

  • FWISD World Languages Institute Site-Based Decision Making Committee Member
  • FWISD International Newcomers Academy Site-Based Decision Making Committee Member
  • TCU Center for Public Education Faculty
  • TCU ANSERS Institute for Special Education Faculty
  • TCU Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies Affiliated Faculty
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Languages

  • English
  • Spanish
  • Somali
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Media Appearances

Bailando con el paisaje linguístico and how we can learn from it (Dr. Steve Przymus)

GuanaKnow  online

2022-06-25

Con el propósito de promover el amor a la lectura en la comunidad, Resplandor Internacional nos comparte esta charla.
Un evento sin costo apto para todo público.

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Presenting Steve Przymus, Richard Ruiz Scholar-in-Residence

University of Arizona - Worlds of Words  online

2022-04-09

Resplandor International and the Worlds of Words Center are pleased to announce Dr. Steve Przymus as the Richard Ruiz Scholar in Residence for 2022. Dr. Przymus is an assistant professor of Educational Linguistics and Bilingual education at Texas Christian University.

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Episode 18: Dr. Steve Przymus

chalkdustpodcast  online

2021-12-10

Today I am talking with Dr. Steve Przymus, an Assistant Professor of Education at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX. I met Steve in 2016 when he joined the faculty in the College of Education. Steve has extensive experience teaching at the middle and high school level, both in the United States and abroad. He now leverages that experience as a teacher, as well as his own research, to help prepare college students for a career in education. I am really looking forward to learning more about Steve and his journey as an educator.

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Research Grants

Linguistic Landscapes in English Language Teaching

U.S. Embassy in Turkey

2019 - 2020

Telling, Reading, and Writing the Right Kinds of Stories

Richard Ruiz Distinguished Scholar in Residence

2022

Articles

Code-switching is metaphor, translanguaging is metonymy: a transdisciplinary view of bilingualism and its role in education

International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

2024

How we talk about bilingualism has an effect on how others think about bilingual individuals, and in turn, how active bilingual learners/users of English (ABLE) students are assessed and taught in schools. I use a transdisciplinary approach of bridging social semiotics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics to explain how code-switching is metaphor, an external perspective of bilingualism as inter-domain linguistic mapping and translanguaging is metonymy, an internal perspective of intra-domain linguistic mapping. By placing translanguaging/metonymy on the syntagmatic axis and code-switching/metaphor on the paradigmatic axis, I demonstrate through example sentences of monolingual and bilingual speech and figures, how accepting the inaccurate metaphor of bilingualism as just code-switching alone, sets in motion countless dichotomies that act to create the bilingualism-as-problem orientation for ABLE students in U.S. schools; most specifically for those at the intersection of bilingualism and disability.

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THE MAGIC OF INSIDER AUTORES Y ESCRITORES: YOUTH STORY TELLERS AS AUTHORS IN A RURAL MEXICAN COMMUNITY-BASED SUMMER PROGRAM

Journal of Literacy Innovation

2023

Set in the Central highlands of México, 73 youth, ages 10-17, became authors and writers (autores y escritores) of their own insider stories. A multinational/multi-institutional research team trained university students from México, the U.S., and Germany on a narrative text structure strategy, that included multimodal representations of text structure (chants, icons, visual text mapping) and in the creation of theme-based (immigration and intercultural competency) wordless picture books for eliciting oracy/literacy development, through story retells. Conducting action research, during a four-day community-based summer camp, university students leveraged magic tricks, theme-based storytelling and retelling, and the Embedded Story Structure (ESS) Routine to facilitate the campers' creation of their own, insider-written, themebased stories. Forty Latinx-authored bilingual children's books about immigration and intercultural competency, were also used as mentor texts for the campers' own stories. All 73 campers completed individual, insider-written children's books. Examples of student-authored stories from each theme and of how youth leaned on the ESS Routine for organizing their thoughts and writing their stories, are shared. Observational and anecdotal data from students, including students with disabilities, are relayed through two vignettes that point to the positive impact of storytelling (oracy) and the ESS Routine on campers' increased motivation and ability to become autores y escritores.

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It's All Gone South! Applying Anzalduan Frameworks to Metonymy, Metaphor, and Mythologies to Understand the Language About Transnational Youth

Applying Anzalduan Frameworks to Understand Transnational Youth Identities

2022

In applying Anzalduan frameworks to metonymy, metaphor, and mythologies, we unearth implicit messaging in common language about transnational youth in order to re-appropriate this rhetoric for a new consciousness. This chapter centers around the testimonios of four transnational individuals who share stories of developing multilingual and multicultural strengths while growing up, when others looked down on them. The authors’ critical discourse analysis exposes multiple directional, spatial, and other conceptual metonymies, metaphors, and myths that act to position transnational youth as having problematic identities. Left unquestioned, these deficit-based narratives get repeated, normalized, become invisible to scrutiny and to convert into the new truth discourse about these youths. Following Anzaldúa’s call to create and recognize a new language and a new consciousness, this chapter concludes with an exercise in semiotically dismantling existing myths with new ways of talking about and thinking about transnational youth.

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