Welcome to the EFL Newsletter!

The Ensuring Full Literacy SSHRC PG started Year 3 of the project with a busy first quarter! As restrictions lifted, in-person data collection has picked up, enabling project work to continue across the PG. Activities within the PG also continued: 

  • The Literacy and Technology & New Media themes delivered presentations from Dr. Susan Rvachew and PhD student Carlos Perez Valle, and Dr. Guofang Li;
  • The Monthly Training Workshops continued with a presentation from Dr. Drew Weatherhead in May;
  • The 2022 Annual Meeting was held in-person for the first time in Toronto, hosted by Dr. Becky Chen and her team at OISE.

Dr. Hélène Deacon’s Language and Literacy Lab (LLL) at Dalhousie University also had a busy and productive Spring! The team was extremely pleased to be able to resume school-based data collection of Grade 4 students in April for year 4 of their 6 year longitudinal study Leaps and Bounds: From Reading Words to Understanding Texts. A huge thank you to their school partners for welcoming the team back to work with open arms! Their project with valued partner, the Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation (CCLF), is preparing to launch a national survey exploring how parents support children’s language and literacy at home in the coming weeks and the team is happy to be able to share some preliminary results from their study on factors that support and impede family well-being during mandatory homeschooling. In addition, the team is excited to be developing a new longitudinal study, The Power of Children’s Learning in Their Reading, on the developmental time course of young children’s abilities to learn during shared book reading.

Since the last newsletter, the LLL team has published two articles with two additional articles in press, been invited to give two presentations, and presented two posters and two papers at conferences. LLL team members Dr. Deacon and Dr. Klaudia Krenca were particularly thrilled to be able to attend the EFL Annual Meeting in person in June and connect with the larger PG team. The LLL team is looking forward to attending and presenting work at the Society for the Scientific Study Reading (SSSR) conference in California and the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS) in Halifax in July. Dr. Deacon and the LLL team also wish to congratulate Émilie Courteau on recently being awarded a Fonds de recherche du Québec – Society and Culture (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellowship. Way to go Émilie!

The Power of Children's Learning in Their Reading

Project Lead: Dr. Hélène Deacon

Research Team: Dr. Nicole Conrad (Saint Mary's University), Stef Hartlin, Dr. Émilie Courteau, Alex Ryken, Savannah Heintzman, Sophie Bhaskara and Marilla Hulls

Reading is central to children’s academic and life outcomes; even in elementary school, teachers expect children to be able to learn from what they read. There is abundant evidence to show that children in grades two and up can learn both the spellings and meanings of novel words through independent reading, and that this learning is related to their word reading skills. However, less is known about the abilities of younger children to learn during shared book reading and the relation of such abilities to early word reading skill.

Learn more...

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.

Read the latest update here...

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 KrencaMariam ElgendiDaneesha 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.
Read the latest update here...


ANNUAL MEETING

We recently hosted the 2022 Ensuring Full Literacy SSHRC PG Annual Meeting in Toronto. This was the first in-person meeting that we have had since the start of the project and it was a huge success!

Thank you so much to those of you who attended, whether in person or online, and to all the wonderful presenters. One of the goals was to continue to foster collaboration across the PG and we accomplished just that.

Thank you also to Becky Chen, Diana Burchell, Nympha Fontanilla, Hélène Deacon, Alona Fyshe, Aaron Newman, and the Multilingualism and Literacy Lab team at OISE for their amazing work in organizing the event and providing support at the event.

For those of you who were unable to join us this year, we have uploaded the presentations and digital posters on the EFL website:

Presentation abstracts and recordings*
Digital posters from the poster session*

LITERACY AND TECHNOLOGY & NEW MEDIA: SPEAKER SERIES

The Literacy and Technology & New Media themes jointly hosted presentations this year. The recordings are available on the EFL website. 

Click here to view the presentations.*

* Please note that these links are accessed through the Member Centre page of the EFL website. To access, you will need to login. If you do not have a user account or forgot your login information, please contact Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca.

Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

Canada Research Chair in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

Assistant Professor, School of Information, UBC

Co-Lead, Computational Modelling Theme, Ensuring Full Literacy SSHRC PG          

OISE, University of Toronto

@mageed
https://mageed.arts.ubc.ca
muhammad.mageed@ubc.ca

Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Department of Linguistics and an Associate Member in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is also a member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Decision making and Action (CAIDA) and the Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems and Director of the Deep Learning & Natural Language Processing (DLNLP) Group at UBC.

In June 2022, Dr. Abdul-Mageed was named a Canada Research Chair (CRC)  in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He also delivered a talk on Deep Learning and Turjuman, a neural machine translation toolkit that he and his team developed, at the 2022 EFL Annual Meeting in Toronto.

Dr. Abdul-Mageed is also a Computational Modelling theme Co-Lead for the EFL SSHRC PG. He answered some questions for us regarding his work with natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning, his recent appointment as a CRC, and how his projects address some of the pressing issues at the forefront of society today.

Read the full article here
Read about the CRC appointment here

Below are some resources to learn more about Dr. Abdul-Mageed and his research:

Turjuman
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.03933.pdf
Demo: https://demos.dlnlp.ai/turjuman/
GitHub: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/turjuman
Documentation: https://turjuman.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/mageed/status/1535306948370845696s=20&t=PcXaO7YDpuEndFLLyDuQjg

Deep Learning (Learnera.ai)
https://bit.ly/3m6Op2C

2022 EFL Annual Meeting Presentation
https://ensuringliteracy.ca/muhammad-abdul-mageed-presentation/

Levesque, K., & Deacon, S.H. (in press). Clarifying links to literacy: How does morphological awareness support children’s word reading development? Applied Psycholinguistics.

Nie, B., Deacon, S. H., Fyshe, A., Demmans Epp, C. (in press). Predicting Reading Comprehension Scores of Elementary School Students. To appear at Educational Data Mining 2022.

Chung, S. C., Koh, P. W., Chen, X., & Deacon, S. H. (2022). Orthographic knowledge: A predictor or an outcome of word reading and spelling in bilingual children? Reading and Writing, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10245-3

Krenca, K., Segers, E., Verhoeven, L., Steele, J., Shakory, S., & Chen, X. (2022). Lexical restructuring stimulates phonological awareness among emerging English-French bilingual children’s literacy. Journal of Child Language, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000083

Krenca, K., Levesque, K., Desroches, A., & Deacon, S. H. (in press). Second language acquisition and reading: The case of French. In K. Koda & R. T. Miller (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and reading. Routledge.

Saha, R., Campbell, J., Werker, J., Fyshe, A. (pre-print). Insights into Early Word Comprehension: Tracking the Neural Representations of Word Semantics in Infants. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.28.466334

Nagoudi, E. M. B., Elmadany, A., Abdul-Mageed, M., (pre-print). TURJUMAN: A Public Toolkit for Neural Arabic Machine Translation. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.03933

Nagoudi, E. M. B., Elmadany, A., Abdul-Mageed, M., (pre-print). AraT5: Text-to-Text Transformers for Arabic Language Generation. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2109.12068

Adebara, I., Abdul-Mageed, M., (pre-print). Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.08351

Jawahar, G., Abdul-Mageed, M., Lakshmanan, L. V. S., (pre-print). Automatic Detection of Entity-Manipulated Text Using Factual Knowledge. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.10343

Sullivan, P., Shibano, T., Abdul-Mageed, M., (pre-print). Improving Automatic Speech Recognition for Non-Native English with Transfer Learning and Language Model Decoding. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.05209

Zhang, C., Abdul-Mageed, M., Jawahar, G., (pre-print). Contrastive Learning of Sociopragmatic Meaning in Social Media. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.07648

SSSR

Abuosbeh, Z., Burchell, D., Krenca, K., & Chen, X. (2022, July 13-16). The impact of online learning on language development in French Immersion. In S.H. Deacon (Chair), Learning to Read in a Digital Age: Children’s Contemporary Reading Experiences [Symposium]. 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Newport Beach, United States of America.

Deacon, S.H., Ryken, A., & Wade-Woolley, L. (2022, July 13-16). Rhythm matters: Prosodic sensitivity and reading ability in Grade 1 English students. In L. Jarmulowicz (Chair), The ups and downs of reading: Prosodic sensitivity and reading in different languages and contexts [Symposium]. 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Newport Beach, United States of America.

Heintzman, S., Conrad, N., & Deacon, S.H. (2022, July 13-16). Vgck Versus Vack: Children’s Knowledge of Print Conventions and Their Word Reading Development. In X. Chen (Chair), Word reading and vocabulary development among young monolingual and bilingual children. [Symposium]. 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Newport Beach, United States of America.

Krenca, K., Taylor, E., & Deacon, S.H. (2022, July 13-16). To click or not to click? Digital features and their relation to children’s digital reading comprehension. In S.H. Deacon (Chair), Learning to Read in a Digital Age: Children’s Contemporary Reading Experiences [Symposium]. 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Newport Beach, United States of America.

MacKay, E., & Deacon, S.H. (2022, July 13-16). Untangling the relation between syntactic skills and reading comprehension: The role of syntactic parsing [Paper presentation]. 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Newport Beach, United States of America.

Raymond, K., Huo, R., Burchell, D., Deacon, S.H., Steele, J., & Chen, X. (2022, July 13-16). Prosodic sensitivity and reading in different languages and contexts: Prosodic Sensitivity and Reading in English-French bilinguals. In L. Jarmulowicz (Chair), The ups and downs of reading: Prosodic sensitivity and reading in different languages and contexts [Symposium]. 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Newport Beach, United States of America.

CSBBCS

Robertson, E. K., MacKay, E. J., Deacon, S. H., Vickers, M. T., & Mimeau, C. (2022, July 18-20). Contributions of syntactic and morphosyntactic awareness to children’s reading comprehension: A longitudinal study [Paper presentation]. Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science Meeting, Halifax, Canada.

 

Deacon, S. H. (2022, April 25). How children handle the complexities of what they read [Paper presentation]. The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China (held virtually).

Krenca, K., Taylor, E., & Deacon, S. H. (2022, June). Digital features and their relation to children’s digital reading comprehension [Paper presentation]. Annual Meeting - Ensuring Full Literacy in a Multicultural and Digital World, Toronto, Canada.

Elgendi, M., Stewart, S.H., Williams, D., Deacon, S. H. (2022, June 15-16). Parent and Child Mental Health during COVID-19: The Role of Household Chaos and COVID-19 Mandated Homeschooling [Poster presentation]. Development 2022 – A Canadian Conference on Developmental Psychology

Elgendi, M., Stewart, S. H., Rodriguez, L., Sherry, S. B., Meier, S., Abbass, A., Nogueira-Arjona, R., Wilson, E. A., Corkum, P., Blais, J., Khoury J., & Deacon, S. H. (2022, June 17-19). Division of labor and parents’ wellbeing during COVID-19: The role of gender and COVID-19 mandated homeschooling [Poster presentation]. Canadian Psychological Association's 83rd Annual National Convention, Calgary, Canada.

Kim, A. J., Sherry, S. B., Smith, M. M., Rodriguez, L. M., Meier, S. M., Nogueira-Arjona, R., Deacon, S. H., Abbass, A., & Stewart, S. H. (2022, June 17-19). Depressive symptoms and relationship conflict: A test of the stress generation hypothesis in romantic couples during the COVID-19 pandemic [Paper presentation]. Canadian Psychological Association’s 83rd Annual National Convention, Calgary, Canada.

Lambe, L. J., Basso, N. L., Kim, A. J., Rodriguez, L. M., Sherry, S. B., Deacon, S. H., Nogueria-Arjona, R., Meier, S., Abbass, A., & Stewart, S. H. (2022, June 17-19). The effects of mandatory homeschooling on couples’ conflict during the COVID-19 pandemic [Paper presentation]. Canadian Psychological Association’s 83rd Annual National Convention, Calgary, Canada.

Abdul-Mageed, M. (2022, May 18). Deep Learning in Speech & Language Processing. Ontario Government Conference: Share Your Science 2022 (virtual).

 

The Language and Literacy Lab was delighted to grow the team this spring with the addition of eight next generation scholars. Emily Byrd and Montse Cavazos Macias joined the team in May for 12 weeks as Mitacs Globalink Interns from the USA and Mexico respectively and are supporting the longitudinal study Leaps and Bounds: From Reading Words to Understanding Texts. Sophie Bhaskara (Laing), Rachel Chen (NSERC), Marilla Hulls (John R. Dingle), and Jolena Klymyshyn (NSERC) joined the team in April for 16 weeks as Undergraduate Summer Research Award Interns and are supporting work on three projects connected to the partnership grant: Leaps and Bounds: From Reading Words to Understanding Texts, How Parents Support Children’s Language and Literacy at Home, and The Power of Children’s Learning in Their Reading. Last, but certainly not least, Sara James and Shada Hamed joined the LLL team this spring as research assistants helping support school based data collection for Leaps and Bounds: From Reading Words to Understanding Texts.

Deanne Wah also joined the Language, Reading & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab and the Knowledge Mobilization Committee, and Dianne Macdonald joined the Multilingualism and Literacy Lab at OISE.

A warm welcome to all!

Deanne Wah

PhD student
Language, Reading & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

University of Western Ontario

Profile

Dianne Macdonald

PhD, S-LP, Reg., OOAQ 
Multilingualism and Literacy Lab


OISE, University of Toronto

Profile

Emily Byrd

Research Assistant 
Language and Literacy Lab


Dalhousie University

Profile

Marilla Hulls
 

Summer Research Assistant
Language and Literacy Lab


Dalhousie University

Profile

Jolena Klymyshyn
 

4th Year, BA in Psychology and Creative Writing
Language and Literacy Lab

Dalhousie University

Profile

Montse Cavazos Macías

Research Intern
Language and Literacy Lab


Dalhousie University

Profile

Rachel Chen

Summer Research Assistant
Language and Literacy Lab

Dalhousie University

Profile

Sophie Bhaskara

Summer Research Assistant
Language and Literacy Lab

Dalhousie University

Profile

Shada Hamed

Summer Research Assistant
Language and Literacy Lab

Dalhousie University

Profile

 

 

Sara James

Research Assistant
Language and Literacy Lab

Dalhousie University

Profile

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