Research
About Dr. Brooks’s Research
Dr. Brooks’s main research interests center on the everyday educational practices that impact the academic trajectories of bilingual adolescents in US schools. She is interested in these seemingly mundane educational practices because they are rarely examined, yet they play important roles in students' lives. In a TESOL Quarterly (2022), she used an intersectional anti-adultism conceptual lens to investigate how 20 high school youths understood the relationship between two routine EL practices—English language proficiency (ELP) testing and EL-related course placement—and their institutional EL classification. This study found that most participants did not use ELP testing or EL-related course placement to recognize their labeling. That is, even though youths took ELP tests and/or were placed in EL-related course placement, most did not realize they were identified as ELs. Youths’ interpretations of the meaning of these two practices were related to how they understood themselves and their schooling experiences. As such, the findings highlight the necessity to create structures for multidirectional and intergenerational communication between youth and adults that challenge institutionalized adultism within EL policy. The interconnection of her research interests across the past decade is the careful analysis of the seemingly mundane, which she contends is fundamental for more just research, policy, and practice.
Dr. Brooks’s research spans the topics of bilingualism, adolescent literacy instruction, language proficiency and assessment, and course placement. Recently, her work has been published in Education Policy Analysis Archives, Teaching and Teacher Education, TESOL Quarterly, and Phi Delta Kappan. Dr. Brooks’ book, Transforming Literacy Education for Long-term English Learners, is actively used in teacher education.
Links to published research are included below. If you would like a copy of any publication , please email Dr. Brooks. You can also see if the publications are available on my ResearchGate page.
Publications (Chronological Order of Publication)
Frankel, K. K., Brooks, M. D., & Learned, J. E. (2025). Teachers’ perspectives on the structure of reading intervention classes in secondary schools: A meta‑synthesis of qualitative research. Teaching and Teacher Education, 162. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2025.105029
Poza, L.E. & Brooks, M.D. (2024) A special case of bias: Racialized bilinguals, testing, and the allocation of opportunity. In A.K. Kibler, A. Walqui, G.C. Bunch, & C.J Faltis (Eds.). Equity in multilingual schools and communities: Celebrating the contributions of Guadalupe Valdés (pp. 206-218). Multilingual Matters.
Brooks, M.D. (2011). The Global Phenomenon of Bi/Multilingualism (Book Review). Linguistics and Education, 22, 294-295.
Selected Research-Related Grants and Awards
Mid-Career Award, AERA’s Second Language Research SIG (2024)
Postdoctoral Fellow, National Academic of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018)
Fellow, STAR Mentorship Program, Literacy Research Association (2015-2017)
Graduate Dissertation Fellow, Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University (2012-2013)
Fellow, Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color , National Council of Teachers of English (2010-2012)
Fellow, G. Richard Tucker Fellowship, Center for Applied Linguistics (2010)