Faculty Profile

Maya Honda

Associate Professor
(617)879-2368
mhonda@wheelock.edu

B.A., 1977, Brandeis University; Ed.M., 1979, Ed.D. 1994, Harvard University

Maya Honda is Associate Professor of Human Development. She is a linguist and a developmental psychologist whose interests are in language and cognitive development. She studies the development of scientific thinking and how to make linguistic inquiry conceptually accessible to students of all ages. She has created and implemented inquiry-based materials to develop students’ scientific thinking and appreciation of the complexity of linguistic knowledge through the grammatical analysis of diverse languages. Honda also works to maintain and promote language diversity through multilingual education. To this end, she has collaborated with teachers in Nicaragua to develop culturally appropriate materials in local languages; she has done similar work with teachers and community educators at the Oklahoma Native American Language Development Institute and the American Indian language Development Institute in Arizona. Honda is author of Linguistic Inquiry in the Science Classroom: “It is science, but it’s not like a science problem in a book” (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 1994), and she is co-author with Wayne O’Neil of Understanding First and Second Language Acquisition (Indigenous Language Institute, 2004) and Thinking Linguistically (in progress; to be published by Blackwell Publishers).