.png) Greetings everyone! I’m so pleased to be sharing with you this first of our – now to be regular – newsletters. As you can see, even without having been able to meet in person for such a very long time – you all have been active, interactive, and productive. While we could see the world beginning to change, little did we know when we submitted the grant (“Ensuring full literacy in a multicultural and digital world”) how much the importance of our proposed research – and the significance of the italicized words - would increase. The success with which you all – researchers and partners alike– have embraced those goals and moved exciting research, KM and KT along – even during this ever-changing pandemic –stands as testimony to the strength of the team. Of course, none of this would be possible without all of you, without our committee leads and next gen scholars, or without our (now, not so) “new” SSHRC PG coordinator, Nympha Fontanilla. We definitely lost momentum (or at least I did) when Ellie moved on and the bureaucracy that is UBC made it take so long to hire a replacement. But, with Nympha’s consistent, persistent, and exceptional support, we have regained and even surpassed our earlier momentum – as evident in this newsletter and the many announcements therein. I already know of new exciting developments that will be shared in the upcoming newsletters, and hope to hear from all of you with more. And, I so look forward to seeing as many of you as possible – hopefully even in person – at our upcoming annual meeting this June.
Dr. Janet Werker Director, Ensuring Full Literacy SSHRC Partnership Grant | Parents Supporting Children’s Language and Literacy at Home Project Lead: Dr. Hélène Deacon Research Team: Dr. Jenny Thomson, Dr. Émilie Courteau, Dr. Klaudia Krenca Partner: Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation The purpose of this research is to better understand how parents supports their children’s language and literacy development at home. As children’s language and literacy skills improve over time, parents’ must continuously adapt their support of those skills to provide scaffolding that is age- and ability-appropriate. For instance, singing rhyming songs is beneficial for language development of young children, but support might shift to enabling reading strategies for older children in the late elementary school years. Learn more... | COVID-19 Pandemic: Factors that Support and Impede Family Well-Being During Mandatory Homeschooling Project Lead: Dr. Hélène Deacon Research Team: Dr. Sherry Stewart, Dr. Klaudia Krenca, Mariam Elgendi, Daneesha Williams, Sarah Dunphy The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruptions to work and family life like never before. For many parents, traditional care supports were suspended with no notice, leaving them to balance homeschooling their children while working from home, with varying degrees of support from education systems. The broad objective of this project is to examine how families functioned through this massive disruption. Learn more... | Optimum Use of Digital Supports to Promote Reading Comprehension Project Lead: Dr. Susan Rvachew Research Team: Dahlia Thompson, Carlos Perez Valle The purpose of this project is to study English-speaking third-grade children’s comprehension of digital stories, presented as a succession of screens containing an illustration, a panel of text, and an avatar that provides information or asks questions about the story. Learn more... | Assessing Morphological Awareness Assessments Project Lead: Dr. Carla Hudson Kam Research Team: Dr. Jenny Thomson, Dr. Carrie Demmans Epp Partner: Julia Rivard Dexter (Eyeread) The goal of this project is to find an assessment of morphological knowledge that a) accurately measures underlying morphological knowledge and b) could be adapted for inclusion within Dreamscape. The research team is part of a group working with Eyeread to support improvements in the pedagogical usefulness of the app, and this project represents a step in that collaborative work. The end goal is to find a way to understand individual-level reading performance in order to have the app better support learners’ trajectories within an automated system. This will help make better reading interventions more accessible to more people. Learn more... | Verb-relevant Information in Children's Picture Books Project Lead: Dr. Carla Hudson Kam We are trying to figure out whether the ways children are often told to engage with books are actually useful for them. In particular, early readers are often encouraged to guess what a word they don't know means, using the pictures on the page in combination with 'what makes sense' given their current oral language knowledge. This technique is only useful if you a) already have the relevant syntactic and word-level knowledge and b) the pictures are actually helpful. Learn more... | UBC-DIVERSEcity Literacy Project Project Lead: Mark Turin Research Team: Henny Yeung, Guofang Li, Robert Hanks Partner: DIVERSEcity Community Resources Society The UBC-DIVERSEcity Language and Literacy Project is an ethnographic study situated within two beginner-level, English as a Second Language (ESL) classes that adopted a hybrid model of in-person and virtual learning by DIVERSEcity Community Resources Society. As of January 2022, however, the classes have temporarily transitioned to being entirely online with an expectation to return to the hybrid model within the coming weeks. Welcoming students from all over the world, DIVERSEcity’s classes are characterized by a high degree of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the research team have been examining student experiences learning English and the role that their English-language and literacy classes play in their transition to life in Canada. The effects and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and virtual learning on teaching strategies, curricula development, and the cultivation of language and literacy skills are additional areas of focus. Learn more... | Literacy and Technology & New Media: Speaker Series Identifying the language skills that children need to succeed in learning to read: Success and opportunities The Literacy and Technology & New Media themes will jointly host presentations this year. We will feature one presentation every month. The first presentation will be given by Dr. Helene Deacon at Dalhousie university. This presentation will take place at 12pm EST on Jan. 25. Please see a brief abstract in the link below. Poster If you are interested in giving a presentation, please contact Becky Chen at xchenbumgardner@gmail.com. | Annual Training Event Machine learning as a primary analysis technique The Annual Training Event will be broken down into two separate events this year. The first part is a fully online workshop on Friday, January 28, 2022, 11am - 1pm PST, 12pm MST, 2pm EST, 3pm AST. The workshop will be led by Rohan Saha and Richard Gerum. Poster The second part of the Training Event will be a hybrid event in on June 19, 2022, ahead of the Annual Meeting. More information on this event will be available in the coming weeks. | Annual Meeting The Annual Meeting has been scheduled to happen on June 20 / 21 2022. The event will be hybrid with the in-person group meeting in Toronto, ON. Planning for the Annual Meeting is currently underway. If you are interested in joining the Annual Meeting Organizing Committee or you would like to participate in any other capacity, please contact Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca. | .png) Dr. Lauren Emberson
Dr. Emberson’s research is in the areas of learning, perception (audition, vision, crossmodal or multisensory), language development, face/object perception, and attention. Emberson investigates these capacities in young infants using behavioral and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fNIRS: functional near infrared spectroscopy). Dr. Emberson works primarily with very young infants (starting at birth through 1 year) and also investigates preterm/premature infants who are at-risk for developmental delays. An overarching goal of Dr. Emberson’s research is to understand the incredible learning capacities of the infant brain, and how these learning abilities contribute to an infant’s rapid development of perception (vision, audition, crossmodal perception). Learn more... | Dr. Hélène Deacon would like to offer a warm welcome to the following next generation scholars who have joined her team at the Language and Literacy Lab at Dalhousie University… PhD Student Émilie Courteau who joined the team in January 2022 and will be helping lead our collaborative projects with the Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation aimed at empowering parents to support full literacy for children and putting the science of literacy into the hands of Canadians. PhD Student Mariam Elgendi who is helping lead our investigation of the impact of mandated homeschooling during the COVID-10 pandemic on family wellbeing along with support from honours students Daneesha Williams and Sarah Dunphy. Honours student Emily Taylor who is helping support our work on digital literacy led by post-doc Dr. Klaudia Krenca. | | | Mariam Elgendi PhD student Clinical Psychology Dalhousie University Profile | | | | Daneesha Williams Honours student Psychology Dalhousie University Profile | | | | Sarah Dunphy 3rd year student BSc in Psychology Dalhousie University Profile | | | | | Emily Taylor Honours student Neuroscience Dalhousie University Profile | | | | Émilie Corteau PhD student P University of Montreal Profile | | | What led you to be interested in developmental psychology and education? I’m a French immersion and special education teacher, and I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of support for exceptional and multilingual students in French programs. I had one student in particular who loved French and wanted to take it, but was forced to drop it since she was not able to get the support she needed to be successful. I’ve always been a big-picture thinker, and I knew it would be more impactful for me to address the issue systemically. I was planning to do a master’s degree and was connected to Dr. Becky Chen, who recommended that I apply to a master’s degree in developmental psychology and education. I quickly fell in love with the field and research. I decided to stay and complete my PhD, and I now plan to pursue research and academia as my career. Outside of your work with EFL, do you have any special skills or talents you can share? For research-related skills, I’m at my best when I’m working with and organizing people, as I have strong interpersonal and project management skills. I currently lead a team of approximately 50 research assistants and I’m the president of my department’s student association. I really love learning about people and figuring out how best to support them in reaching their full potential. In my personal life, I’m a bit of a cat whisperer. I’ve adopted two adorable stray cats this year (Minnie and Luna), and I bond really quickly with other people’s cats. Can you tell us a little bit about your research? Read more | Julia Rivard-Dexter, CEO of Eyeread, answered some of our questions regarding their work. Please tell us a little bit about Eyeread. Eyeread (developer of Dreamscape) is a learning platform that delivers research based digital literacy technologies in the form of video games for all learners. We support educators in the delivery of ELA programming aligned to curriculum with a goal to help players master important comprehension skills. Our programs are unique because of our adaptive learning technology ensuring the content students are presented adapts to the users unique ability. The platform is adopted because of its engagement for kids leading to exceptionally high user adoption. Dreamscape is our first digital game on the Eyeread platform. It’s unique multiplayer video game design captures kids' interest leading to increased motivation for reading and learning. Dreamscape offers a student diagnostic for placement into the reading content, reports showing progress over time and current reading skill and assignments that educators and parents can deliver through the games. The platform is free to use with optional memberships to unlock additional game assets. Anyone interested can set up a free account here: https://www.playdreamscape.com As one of our key data collection partners, can you tell us about your involvement with projects across the Partnership Grant? Read more | Parks, K. M., Moreau, C. N., Hannah, K. E., Brainin, L., & Joanisse, M. F. (2021). The Task Matters: AScoping Review on Reading Comprehension Abilities in ADHD. Journal of Attention Disorders,10870547211068047. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F10870547211068047 Turin, M., & Hanks, R. (2021). Literacy. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.http://doi.org/10.29164/21literacy Afreen, A., & Norton, B. (in press). Bangla and the identity of the heritage language teacher. Educational Linguistics [Inaugural issue] Deacon, S. H., Rodriguez, L. M., Elgendi, M., King, F. E., Nogueira-Arjona, R., Sherry, S. B., & Stewart, S. H. (2021). Parenting through a pandemic: Mental health and substance use consequences to couples of mandated homeschooling. Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, 10(4), 281-293.http://doi.org/10.1037/cfp0000171 DesRoches, D. I., Deacon, S. H., Rodriguez, L. M., Sherry, S. B., Nogueira-Arjona, R., Elgendi, M. M., Meier, S., Abbass, A., King, F. E., & Stewart S. H. (2021). Homeschooling during COVID-19: Gender differences in work–family conflict and alcohol use behaviour among romantic couples. Social Sciences, 10(7), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10070240 MacKay, E. J., Conrad, N., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). How does lexical access fit into models of word reading? Scientific Studies of Reading. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2021.1993230 Critten, S., Holliman, A. J., Hughes, D. J., Wood, C., Cunnane, H., Pillinger, C., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). A longitudinal investigation of prosodic sensitivity and emergent literacy. Reading and Writing, 34(2), 371-389. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10077-7 Levesque, K., Breadmore, H., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). How morphology impacts reading and spelling: Advancing the role of morphology in models of literacy development. Journal of Research in Reading, 44(1), 10-26. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12313 MacKay, E., Lynch, E., Sorenson Duncan, T., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Informing the science of reading: Students’ awareness of sentence-level information is important for reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(1), 221-230. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.397 Metsala, J. L., Sparks, E., David, M., Conrad, N., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). What is the best way to characterise the contributions of oral language to reading comprehension: Listening comprehension or individual oral language skills? Journal of Research in Reading, 44(3), 675-694. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12362 Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Not all sentences are created equal: Evaluating the relation between children’s understanding of basic and difficult sentences and their reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(2), 268–278. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000545 Tong, X., Kwan, J. L. Y., Tong, X., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). How Chinese–English bilingual fourth graders draw on syntactic awareness in reading comprehension: Within‐ and cross‐language effects. Reading Research Quarterly. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.400 | Deacon, S. H., Ryken, A., Kadam, R., & Frempong, G. (2022, January). Identifying the language skills that children need to succeed in learning to read: Success and opportunities [Paper presentation]. Inter-University Research Network Spring Symposium (held virtually). Deacon, S. H. (2022, March). Words and sentences: How they can support reading for all learners [Paper presentation]. 2022 Donald G. Doehring Memorial Lecture, McGill University School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, Montreal, Canada. Li, G., (2022, March). Promoting Multilingualism During and Beyond the Pandemic: Lessons from Chinese Households in Vancouver. The Decoda Literacy Conference 2022: Literacy Connects Us!, Richmond BC, Canada. For a list of interviews and presentations in 2021, see here. | MITACS ACCELERATE - Enhanced leveraging Deadline: March 1, 2022 For a limited time, Mitacs is offering enhanced leveraging so that partner contributions are matched 3:1 by Mitacs vs. the usual 1:1 match. This means that partners cover only 25% of the project's cost instead of the 50% they would typically pay. Please note the following limitations of the enhanced leveraging: - Partner organization (company or NFP) must have less than 500 employees to qualify
- Intern must be named (not listed as TBD) to qualify
- March 1 2022 deadline
Mitacs Accelerate funding models for each 4-6 month internship: - $10k option: $2,500 from the partner + $7,500 from Mitacs (full award paid to the intern)
- $15k option: $3,750 from the partner + $11,250 from Mitacs (intern receives $10k min, remainder available for research expenses)
- $20k option: $5,000 from the partner + $15,000 from Mitacs (intern receives $10k min, remainder available for research expenses)
More information POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW POSITION - Open Deadline: April 1, 2022 Guofang Li has an open Post-doctoral Fellow position within the Department of Language and Literacy Education at UBC. Please share this with your teams or with anyone you know who might be interested. More information | The Knowledge Mobilization Committee will publish the EFL Newsletter monthly. If you have any content that you want to share with the team, please send them to Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca. | | | | |
