Kay Gallagher

Kay Gallagher currently serves as Acting Dean of the College of Education at Zayed University. Kay is an Abu Dhabi-based teacher, teacher educator, educational leader, and scholar in English language education and language teacher education. She holds academic qualifications from the University of Kent in the UK (PhD), Trinity College in Dublin (MEd), St Patrick’s College at the National University of Ireland (BEd 1st class hons), the University of Melbourne in Australia (PGCert), Trinity College in London (DipTESOL), and the University of British Columbia in Canada (SOTL Leadership). Kay is also a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). Kay has extensive experience of leading education programs, including previous positions as Chair of the Education Department at Abu Dhabi Women’s College, and as Head of Education Studies and English at Abu Dhabi Education Council’s Teachers’ College, ECAE. In the past, Kay was the founding Principal of a progressive, learner-centred, multicultural school in Ireland, and later was a Teaching Fellow in the English Language Education Division of the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong in China. Kay has created and facilitated numerous professional development courses for teachers in the UAE and in Ireland, and has provided educational consultancy, external program review, and external examiner services in the UAE, the UK and Oman. She has presented her work at international conferences in Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Japan, Oman, Singapore, the UAE, the UK, and the USA.

Research interests encompass bilingual education, medium of instruction policy and practice, pedagogical translanguaging, teacher education, learning and teaching in higher education, educational development and innovation, and English language education.

Research and Professional Activities

Dillon, A., Chell, G., Grey, I., Gallagher, K. and Moussa-Inaty, J. (2021). English Medium Instruction and the potential of translanguaging practices in higher education. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts. 7 (2).

Jones, W., Gallagher, K. & Midraj, J. (2020). Does size really matter in university preparatory English language classrooms? Issues in Educational Research. 30 (3), 988-1004.

Gallagher, K. (2020). Early childhood language education in the UAE. In M. Schwartz (ed.) International Handbook of Early Language Learning. Springer.

Gallagher, K., Dillon, A. & Mahlafi, H. (2019). ‘Miss, you Arabic or English Teacher?’ Teacher identity construction in an early years bilingual classroom. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI) Proceedings. ISBN: 978-84-09-14755-7

Gallagher, K. (2019). (Ed.) Education in the UAE: Innovation and Transformation. Singapore: Springer. ISBN 978-981-13-7735-8

Gallagher, K. & Al-Bataineh, A. (2019). An investigation into the linguistic landscape of translingual storybooks for Arabic-English bilingual children. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.

Dillon, A. & Gallagher, K. (2019). The experience of co-teaching for emergent Arabic-English Biliteracy. The Qualitative Report 24 (7).

Al-Bataineh, A. & Gallagher, K. (2018). Attitudes towards translanguaging: how future teachers perceive the meshing of Arabic and English in children’s storybooks. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

Gallagher, K. (2016). From ‘late-late’ to ‘early-early’ immersion: Discontinuities and dilemmas in medium of instruction policies and practices. In L. Buckingham (ed). The place of English in Gulf Arab societies. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Gallagher, K. (2011). Bilingual education in the UAE: Factors, variables, and critical questions. Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, 4(1), 62-79.

Gallagher, K. (2011). Becoming and re-becoming a teacher in the Arabian Peninsula: Amal’s story of hope. Teacher Development 15(2), 141-155.