Lilly Wong Fillmore (born 1934) is an American linguist.
She is Professor Emerita in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
She attributes her interest in second language education to her own experience of starting school not knowing any English, in a community with many immigrants.
[2] Wong Fillmore earned her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1976 with a dissertation entitled, "The Second Time Around: Cognitive and social strategies in second language acquisition".
[3] In 1974, she became assistant dean for student affairs at UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Education.
She began teaching there as an assistant professor two years later and spent her entire career at UC-Berkeley, attaining the position of Jerome A. Hutto Professor of Education before her retirement in 2004.
[2] Wong Fillmore has worked on issues related to education of language minority children in the US since the 1950s, when she was a volunteer teacher in a California migrant labor camp.
She has conducted several large-scale research projects investigating how children of Asian or Latino background adjust, both linguistically and academically, to the US public school classroom environment.
Language Learning through Bilingual Instruction, Final Report to the National Institute of Education.
Language Processing in Social Context, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.