Welcome to the March 2022 edition of the EFL Newsletter! | Deacon, S. H. (2022, March 16 [forthcoming]). Fast, faster, fastest…the forces that propel children’s reading development [Research Group Presentation]. Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil (held virtually). Deacon, S. H. (2022, March 25). Language skills that enable reading [Webinar]. Learning Disabilities Institute’s 47th Annual Conference, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (held virtually). Krenca, K., Taylor, E., & Deacon, S.H. (2022, July). To click or not to click? Digital features and their relation to children’s digital reading comprehension. Symposium to conducted at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Newport Beach, United States of America. Abuosbeh, Z., Burchell, D., Krenca, K., & Chen, X. (2022, July). The impact of online learning on language development in French Immersion. Symposium to conducted at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Newport Beach, United States of America. | Arredondo, M.M, Aslin, R.N., Zhang, M., & Werker, J.F. (2022) Attentional orienting abilities in bilinguals: Evidence from a large infant sample. Infant Behavior and Development, 66, 101683. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101683 Arredondo, M.M., Aslin, R.N., & Werker, J.F. (2022). Bilingualism alters infants’ cortical organization for attentional orienting mechanisms. Developmental Science, 25(2), e13172. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13172 Weatherhead, D., & Werker, J. F. (2022). 20‐month‐olds selectively generalize newly learned word meanings based on cues to linguistic community membership. Developmental Science, e13234. Advance Online. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13234 Sohail, J., Sorenson Duncan, T., Koh, P. W., Deacon, S. H., & Chen, X. (2022). How syntactic awareness might influence reading comprehension in English-French bilingual children. Reading & Writing, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10245-3 Krenca, K., Segers, E., Verhoeven, L., Steele, J., Shakory, S., & Chen, X. (in press). Lexical restructuring stimulates phonological awareness among emerging English-French bilingual children’s literacy. Journal of Child Language. | What led you to be interested in developmental psychology and education? I have always been curious about the skills that children need to understand what they read given its foundational role in all aspects of life. This curiosity to learn more about children’s development led me to complete a PhD in Developmental Psychology and Education, under Dr. Becky Chen’s supervision, at the University of Toronto. As a Canadian-born English language learner, I learned Polish as my first language and began to learn English when I started kindergarten. My teacher was impressed by my ability to acquire English language and communication skills within the first three months of the school year and recommended that I enrol in the French immersion program. However, my parents were not convinced that I would develop sufficient English proficiency and they decided I should stay in the English program. I then went on to complete the Extended French program throughout my upper elementary and high school years. Throughout my graduate studies, I realized that I was able to use the language and literacy skills developed in my first language as a springboard for learning to read, write, and communicate in English and French. What kind of projects/work would you be doing in an ideal future? I am interested in pursuing projects that will allow me to leverage the many transferrable skills I developed as a researcher. In particular, I would like to share my subject-matter expertise in language and literacy development with stakeholders at all levels throughout various stages of the research process in order to ensure that information targets appropriate audiences and promotes informed decision-making at all levels. I am also passionate about the scholarship of teaching and learning and completed several intensive programs on teaching in higher education throughout my graduate degree. Can you tell us a little bit about your research? ... Read more | | | | |
