Welcome to the EFL Newsletter!

In the second quarter of Year 3 of the Ensuring Full Literacy SSHRC PG:

- The Trainee Exchange Program was launched on September 1st and a call for proposals was made in parallel with the Co-Applicant Research Fund. 

- The Tapping the Tree series started with a presentation from Dr. Alona Fyshe on September 14th, followed by a Trainee networking event hosted by the Training Committee on September 28th.

- A new study by Dr. Aaron Newman and Dr. Henny Yeung, in collaboration with Mango Languages, started recruiting for participants.

- Kaitlyn Tagarelli, Head of Research at Mango Languages, a new partner for the grant, answered some questions for us regarding their work, their organizational goals and how a partnership with the Ensuring Full Literacy SSHRC PG meets those goals.

Efficacy of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning

Project Leads: Dr. Aaron Newman, Dr. Henny Yeung

Research Team: Magda Ivok, Cindy Hamon-Hill

Partner: Mango Languages

The goal of this study is to learn if a language app is useful in helping people to improve their English abilities, and how app usage might interact with other ESL instruction people are receiving (e.g., classes).

Drs Newman and Yeung have partnered with Mango Languages to provide new Canadians whose first language is not English with free access to an ESL (English as a second language) program offered through the app, Mango Languages, for an 8 week period.

Participants would complete English assessments before and after the 8 weeks period as well as questionnaires around language history, and attitudes and motivations towards learning English. This is a fully online study for people who live anywhere in Canada, age 17+ years, and who are early-stage English learners, equivalent to CEFR level A or possibly low B. They may be a fluent speakers of one of the many languages for which Mango has an ESL program ((Bengali, Haitian Creole, Hmong, Mandarin, Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (MSA), Armenian, Cantonese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese).

What makes a skilled reader?

Project Lead: Dr. Aaron Newman

Research Team: Dr. Hélène Deacon, Laura Elliott, Saisha Rankaduwa, Cindy Hamon-Hill

In this study, we are focusing on the crucially important transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" that children go through in the early grades. Our specific objective is to characterize how individual differences in reading sub-skills relate to children's patterns of brain activation, and how these relationships change during the most important transition in reading development.

Read more...

Kaitlyn Tagarelli, Head of Research at Mango Languages, answered some of our questions regarding their work.

Please tell us a little bit about Mango Languages.

Mango Languages is a language learning software company. Our core product is a language learning app, with courses in over 70 world languages and over 20 English as a Second Language (e.g., English for Spanish Speakers, English for Mandarin Speakers, etc.) courses. We are committed to creating high-quality, effective language learning tools, and our team is innovating every day in fulfillment of our company ethos, “to enrich lives with language and culture.”

Can you tell us about your involvement with projects across the Partnership Grant?

Over the past year, we have worked with Aaron Newman and Henny Yeung to develop a research project aimed at evaluating the efficacy of mobile-assisted language learning for English learners in Canada. Thus far, Mango has supported this partnership by granting access to our language learning software to the researchers involved in this project, training researchers to create free accounts for participants, and providing access to usage and assessment data. We have also been meeting regularly with the research team to discuss research design and data analysis, provide input on ethics proposals, and support the team with any information and needs related to the use of and experimentation with Mango Languages products.

How do these projects relate to Mango’s goals?

At Mango, we are committed to creating high-quality, effective language learning tools. We are therefore excited to be collaborating on a research project that puts our materials to the test. We look forward to using the results of this study and future studies to inform improvements to our products and to continue bringing language learning success to people around the world.

More specifically, some of our recent initiatives have focused on understanding and addressing the language learning needs of K-12 students, teachers, and administrators, with particular attention to the needs of English learners. As such, we are delighted to participate in this project, which strives to understand the role technology can play in the facilitation of language acquisition in diverse populations.

Is there anything else you would like to highlight or share with the PG?

It has been a pleasure to work with Dr. Newman, Dr. Yeung, and their fantastic group of students on this project. We’re looking forward to the next phase of the study!

Nie, B., Deacon, H., Fyshe, A., Demmans Epp, C. (2022). Predicting Reading Comprehension Scores of Elementary School Students. In 15th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6852952

Teodorescu, D., Matalski, J., Lothian, D., Barbosa, D., Demmans Epp, C. (2022). Cree Corpus: ACollection of nêhiyawêwin Resources. In 60^th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. (pp. 6354-6364). Association for Computational Linguistics. http://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.440

Orena, A.J., Mader, A.S., & Werker, J.F. (2022). Learning to recognize unfamiliar voices: An online study with 12-and 24-month-olds. Frontiers in Psychology, Developmental Psychology, (13), 874411.(Open access).

Tapping the Tree Series

Tapping the Tree is a series of talks and events designed to foster dialogue and encourage cross-collaboration across the grant team. The goal is not to create new projects with multiple collaborators, but rather to gain new perspective and get feedback on new ideas.

September 14, 2022 - In the inaugural presentation for Tapping the Tree, Dr. Alona Fyshe presented a proposal for a study of story-telling in infants.

September 28, 2022 - The Training Committee held a virtual Networking Event where Next Generation Scholars introduced themselves, their research, and their interests through lightning pitches.

The series will continue into the next quarter with a presentation from Xin Sun on October 12th. If you are interested in presenting, please reach out to Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca. 

Call for Proposals

Co-Applicant Research Fund - due October 31, 2022
Trainee Exchange Program - due October 31, 2022

The Trainee Exchange Program for 2022-23 was recently launched along with a call for proposals. At the same time, a call for applications was also made for the Co-Applicant Research Fund for 2022-23. 

The Exchange Program aims to provide graduate students and postdocs with opportunities to gain specialized knowledge – with a focus on complementary techniques – in labs at institutions other than their own, as well as opportunities to grow their professional networks. In parallel, the Co-Applicant Research Fund aims to encourage collaborations across the PG on projects that may include Next-Generation Scholars, and industry, community or outreach partners.

As such, when applying, we encourage you to think about the synergies of these two programs. Note: it is not mandatory to apply to both programs to be considered. You can apply to the:

1. Co-Applicant Research Fund only (if eligibility criteria are met);
2. Trainee Exchange Program only (if all eligibility criteria are met); or
3. Co-Applicant Research Fund and the Trainee Exchange Program (if all eligibility criteria are met for both programs).

Important dates to remember:

Applications will be reviewed by the Funding Subcommittee and funds allocated based on their recommendations. As funds are limited, we may not be able to fund all projects even where the proposal meets all criteria.

To request an application form for one or both of the above email Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca, or visit the Member Centre of the Ensuring Full Literacy website. 

Create an infographic for your project

The Knowledge Mobilization Committee is working with teams across the PG to create infographics for recently completed projects and papers. This is a free service led by two Next Generation Scholars, Leah Brainin and Deanne Wah to support the project's knowledge mobilization.

The first published infographic was for Activities for Reading Comprehension, a new free tool for hyperlexic preschoolers on the autism spectrum.

If you are interested and would like to work with Leah and Deanne, you can reach out to ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca.

The Knowledge Mobilization Committee will publish the EFL Newsletter quarterly. If you have any content that you want to share with the team, please send them to Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca.