Principal - Dr. Laura Sicola
About Us
Dr. Laura Sicola is the founder of the Sicola Consulting Group, providing linguistic, intercultural and pedagogical training for organizations and individuals seeking to improve their communication skills and instructional strategies to meet the needs of the global school and workplace. She has delivered workshops, developed and executed long-term curricula, and conducted private coaching sessions in areas ranging from cross-cultural communication to advanced business English and intelligibility, teaching English-language-learners in public schools, presentation and public speaking skills, and foreign language development strategies. Her client list includes such institutions as IBM, JP Morgan/Chase Card Services; the Wharton School of Business; Foundations, Inc.; Mercator XXI; and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, as well as a variety of school districts across the country.
Dr. Sicola is faculty at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, where she lectures on second-language acquisition theory and pedagogy and oversees the fieldwork component of the MA-TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) program. She has been an English/ESL/EFL teacher and curriculum designer for the University of Pennsylvania, for the Nagoya City Board of Education in Nagoya, Japan, and for the Los Angeles Unified School District at a bilingual elementary school in south-central L.A.
She received a BA in international studies from American University, an MA in multicultural education and bilingual teaching credential from California State University, and a PhD in educational linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. She has given presentations on language, cultural and education at a variety of local and international conferences such as Global Entrepreneurship Week (Cairo,) TESOL (New York, Boston), Japan-US Teacher Education Consortium (Japan,) the Association for Language Awareness (Spain,) Families in Global Transition (Houston), Task-Based Language Teaching (Honolulu,) and the Linguistic Academy University of Duisberg (Germany), among others. She has published several books and articles on her primary research areas of cognitive processing in second/foreign language acquisition, phonology/pronunciation, and linguistic culture shock.
Affiliations
The Sicola Consulting Group works with a cadre of affiliate organizations and independent experts in the fields of globalization, cross-cultural communication, language and education
- Mercator XXI, LLC - www.mercatorxxi.com
- Cunningham Consulting - cunninghamconsultingglobal.com/
- English language education experts, for professional and academic clientele
- TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) www.tesol.org
- AAAL (The American Association of Applied Linguistics) www.aaal.org
- ACTFL (The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) www.actfl.org
- Families in Global Transition www.figt.org
- Penn TESOL East www.penntesoleast.org
