Adeola Agoke

Dr. Adeola Agoke serves as Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of the African Languages Program in the Department of African Cultural Studies within the Arts and Culture faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her PhD in African Cultural Studies, specializing in sociocultural and applied linguistics, and her MA in African Languages and Literature from UW-Madison, complemented by a BA in Yoruba Linguistics and Literature from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. A native of Nigeria, Agoke arrived at UW-Madison as a Fulbright exchange scholar in the Department of African Languages and Literature and was honored as a 2015 College of Letters and Science Teaching Fellow.

Agoke's academic interests encompass sociocultural and applied linguistics, language pedagogy, critical discourse studies, cultures and languages of Africa, language internationalization, global citizenship, decolonization of curricula, classroom social dynamics, and instructed second language acquisition. Her research examines Yoruba language learners' linguistic creativity, multilingual practices in southwestern Nigeria, and pedagogical implications for standard dialect development. Notable publications include the Proficiency-Based Dictionary of Yorùbá Language for Foreign and Second Language Learners (2024), an innovative open educational resource featuring lexicons, sample sentences, audio-visual content, and ACTFL-aligned proficiency levels, now utilized by learners at UW-Madison and beyond. She also authored “Pedagogical processes and standard dialect use: Implications for creative multilingual interaction from a Yorùbá-language classroom in southwestern Nigeria” in The Modern Language Journal (2023), and co-authored “A Multilanguage Seminar for the Twenty-First Century: Rethinking Self-Instruction for the Least Commonly Taught Languages” (2023). Additional works feature contributions to Culture and Customs of the Yoruba (2017) and Language and Literature: Vehicles for the Enhancement of Cultural Understanding (2016).

In her leadership role, Agoke curates contextualized learning resources for African languages, supervises instructors applying SLA theories, and teaches courses such as The Politics of Language in Africa and the Diaspora, Language Mobility and Globalization, Teaching Methods in Less Commonly Taught Languages, and all levels of Yoruba. She has secured significant funding, including a $304,331 Department of Education grant as co-principal investigator for research on self-instructional LCTL learning via the UW-Madison Multilanguage Seminar, and a UW-Madison Language Institute grant for African language pedagogy dictionaries. Her contributions enhance access to African languages, promote decolonized pedagogies, and support high-proficiency learning outcomes.

Professional Email: adeola.agoke@wisc.edu