Kristin Lems, Ed.D.

ESL and Bilingual Education endorsement coursework, and 

• Using Music and Song to Teach and Learn Languages
• Visual Literacy
• Intro to Linguistics
• Reading in the Content Areas

Awards and Honors

Elliot Judd Award for Excellence in Teaching, Illinois TESOL/BE, 2021
Excellence in Teaching Award (one given annually), NLU, 2018
Nominee, Edward Fry Book Award, National Reading Conference, for Fluency Instruction:  Research-based Best Practices (Rasinski/Blachowicz/Lems, Eds. 2006)
Finalist, Outstanding Dissertation, International Reading Association, 2005
Rebecca Barr Award, Reading Doctoral Program at National Louis, 2005
First Place Hopwood Award, Poetry, University of Michigan

Areas of Expertise: 

Teaching and Learning English as a New Language
Literacy in a New Language
Methods and Materials for Teaching Multilingual Learners
English Word Formation
Literacy Best Practices
Reading Fluency Instruction
Using Music for Teaching and Learning
Arts-integrated Learning

Doctoral Committees:

Dr. Lems has served on nearly a dozen doctoral committees as both chair, committee member, and Dean’s representative, in Reading and Language, Educational Leadership, Educational Equity, and Teaching and Learning.

Biography:

Kristin Lems is an active scholar and leader within the National College of Education. She has won two Fulbright Awards in EFL/Applied Linguistics, to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and Algiers, Algeria. Lems has also directed or co-directed two 5-year training grants from the U.S. Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition. 

She is first author of a textbook now in its third edition:  Building Literacy with Multilingual Learners:  Insights from Linguistics (Lems/Soro/Charles, 2024, Guilford Press).  She has written or edited 5 additional books with Scholastic and Guilford, and chapters and refereed articles in Reading Teacher, Reading in a Foreign Language, Writing Systems Research, Learning Abstracts, English Teaching Forum, Booklinks, and ERIC Digests.  She is Lead Editor of a column focusing on English language learners for Illinois Reading Council Journal.  She is also a feature writer for the Evanston Roundtable.

Lems has composed and written a full-length musical, Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks, which had a staged reading at Beverly Arts Center in summer 2022, based on a true story about the friendship between her great grandmother and Jane Addams of Hull House. 

She has won numerous state and national awards for her active role in singing for women’s rights. She sings regularly for a preschool academy, for adults in assisted living and senior care, and at local venues, and she has 8 full length CDs of mostly original songs

She has served on the Evanston Environment Board and chairs Think Green NLU, an employee interest-based group focusing on sustainable practices.

Education: 

Ed.D., Reading and Language, National Louis University
M.A., Teaching English as a Second Language, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
M.A., West Asian Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
A.B., English/creative writing, Secondary Teaching certificate in English, University of Michigan

Kristin Lems, Ed.D...klems@nl.edu
312-261-3699
18-226 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60606