Roberta J. Herter

Roberta J. Herter, Ph.D., is a Professor of Education at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, where her work focuses on literacy, writing, and second language learning. She earned her Ph.D. in English and Education from the University of Michigan and previously taught English in Detroit Public Schools for 30 years before moving into teacher education at Cal Poly, where she has taught for about two decades.

Herter is coauthor of Teaching Cognates/Cognados Through Picture Books: Resources for Fostering Spanish–English Vocabulary Connections (Paul H. Brookes, 2023), written with José A. Montelongo and Anita Hernández, along with multiple scholarly articles on Spanish–English cognates and their use in literacy instruction. Her publications include work on English–Spanish cognates in award-winning picture books and on using picture book reading lists, such as the Texas 2x2 list, to support vocabulary, morphology, and orthography development for bilingual and Latino English language learners.