Happy New Year and welcome to the first newsletter for 2023! 

2022 was an exciting year for the grant. Labs went back to fully in-person operations and we saw a big push for outcomes. The year began with the Literacy and Technology & New Media presentation series and halfway through, we hosted the first in-person meeting since the project started in 2020. The 2-day event, which was held at OISE, University of Toronto, was a great success and the momentum and excitement from the event continued into the second half of the year, with the introduction of the Tapping the Tree series and the Trainee Exchange Program in September 2022. 

The Co-Applicant Research Fund funded projects from 2020 and 2021 concluded and we saw some of these outcomes presented at the annual meeting. In November 2022, two new exciting projects were approved for funding from this program, and the abstracts for both projects are shared below. 

2023 will mark our transition into the second half of the project and we look forward to seeing new projects and new initiatives, more outcomes, and the continuation of the Tapping the Tree series.

This newsletter takes a brief look at some of the major outcomes from the last quarter, gives an overview of what's to come in 2023, and highlights some of the big events from 2022.

The following projects were approved for funding in the most recent Co-Applicant Research Fund call for applications. 

The Influence of Culture on Word Learning
Project Leads: Dr. Drew Weatherhead, Dr. Hélène Deacon

Several theories detail the role of affect (e.g.,frustration, flow) in language learning and technology-enhancedlearning. So far, these theories do not yet go as far as detailing howgame elements might influence young learner’s affect and literacydevelopment. More importantly, there is little work into how gameelements interact with learner’s abilities to monitor and manage theiremotional responses (i.e., meta-affect) to learning during game play.Existing instruments for measuring affect and meta-affect have beendeveloped for use with adults or high-literacy learners. Givenon-going trends for gamifying applications that aim to supportlanguage learning and literacy development, we need instruments thatwork well with children and those whose abilities in the targetlanguage are still developing. This project will adapt existing instruments so that they can be integrated into a game-based environment (i.e., Dreamscape) and used in future research. The development of these instruments will enable the broader study of young learners’ meta-affective strategies by enabling the measurement of their meta-affective tendencies so that those can be linked to behavioural patterns in educational technologies.

Measuring Learning Affect to Understand How They Manage It When Playing Literacy Games
Project Lead: Dr. Carrie Demmans Epp
Research Team: Minghao Cai
Partner: Shoelace Learning

Book reading provides an incredibly rich opportunity for word learning. In this project, we ask whether the cultural context of the story influences children’s word-learning in terms of spelling and/or meaning in a self-teaching task. This project bridges across the goals of the partnership grant and will be the first of a series of collaborations across the Weatherhead and Deacon research labs.

In this work, we apply sociolinguistic principles of oral word learning to a book reading task. Four-to-six-year-olds will complete a standard self-teaching’ task in which children read short stories about new words—inventions—after which they are tested on the spelling and meaning of these words. Key to this study, we will introduce two different types of cultural manipulations. We will vary 1) the cultural identity of the inventor of these new inventions, and 2) the cultural familiarity of the inventions themselves.

The research that we propose connects the SSHRC PG grant themes of Culture, Oral Language, and Literacy. The results of this work will help to identify how cultural diversity in stories affects word learning during book reading, thus allowing us to devise solutions to overcome any limitations apparent in unfamiliar learning contexts and utilize any benefits that may be observed. The outcomes of this work will support literacy development more broadly, with the potential for a particularly positive impact on children from immigrant communities.

Infographics

The Knowledge Mobilization Committee piloted a project to create infographics for the grant. Below are 2 outcomes from this project. If you are interested in creating infographics for your work, please contact the team, led by Next Generation Scholars Leah Brainin and Deanne Wah, at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca.

Annual Meeting 2023 - Vancouver, BC

The meeting will be hosted at the University of British Columbia and held over 2 days, on May 25th - 26th, 2023. Planning is currently ongoing with more details to be shared on the program over the coming months. 

For those planning to attend in person, there are accommodation options at UBC. Download this brochure or click here for more information. If you have any questions or if you would like help with booking your accommodations at UBC, please contact Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca.

Tapping the Tree Series

This series was launched in September 2022, and is a direct outcome of the annual meeting. The intention is to establish a way to “tap the tree” of the accumulated knowledge of the grant team and to share resources. It is a place for anyone in the team to brainstorm new ideas, to present on proposed research methods for new projects, or to present analysed data.

The series will continue in this quarter. If you would like to give a presentation, please contact Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca.

Trainee Exchange Program

The program was launched in September 2022 with a call for applications. It 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.

While no exchanges were approved in the first round, we expect a new call to be made in 2023.

Literacy and Technology & New Media Themes: Speaker Series

This series delivered four separate presentations on the work being done by the teams within the Literacy and Technology & New Media themes. Dr. Hélène Deacon, Literacy theme Co-Lead, and Dr. George Frempong, Director of Research at Delmore "Buddy" Daye Learning Institute, delivered the first presentation in January 2022. Over the following months, we saw presentations from Dr. Jenny Thomson and Dr. Susan Rvachew, Technology & New Media Co-Leads, and Dr. Guofang Li. 

The first presentation was delivered in January 2022. Identifying the language skills that children need to succeed in learning to read: success and opportunities, presented by Dr. Hélène Deacon and Dr. George Frempong, explored the relations between early language skills and Grade 2 reading levels, and employed intersectional analysis to explore the extent to which learners’ racial and socioeconomic identity groupings impact their language skills and opportunity to learn.

Project GAMEPLAY: can the application of machine learning to literacy gameplay data improve identification of struggling readers?, presented by Dr. Jenny Thomson, introduced project GAMEPLAY, which aims to develop a method for the early identification of first graders at risk of developing reading and writing difficulties. The talk explored the affordances and challenges of “big data” approaches to risk predictions, and discussed the utility of these methods in the Ensuring Full Literacy project.

Diversity and Literacy Acquisition, presented by Dr. Susan Rvachew, Carlos Perez Valle, and Dahlia Thompson, covered several studies that explore how child, book, and reader characteristics all play a role in literacy acquisition.

The final presentation in the series, Home Literacy Environment and Early Bilingual Vocabulary Gaps, presented by Dr. Guofang Li, discussed Chinese Canadian and bilingual first graders’ parterns of achievement in English and Chinese oral receptive vocabulary and unpacked various home literacy environment factors.

To view recordings of these presentations, click here. 

Training Event

The Training Committee hosted a virtual workshop in January 2022. At the event, HQPs Rohan Saha and Richard Gerum delivered a presentation, Machine learning as a primary analysis technique, followed by a hands-on interactive example that demonstrated the techniques covered.

A recording of this workshop, and other resources, can be accessed through the Member Centre page of the Ensuring Full Literacy website. Since these workshops are part of the training activities offered exclusively to Next Generation Scholars in the grant, access to the page will require a log in. If you do not know your log in information or need help setting up a user account, please contact Nympha at ensuring.literacy@ubc.ca. 

Annual Meeting 2022 - Toronto, ON

The first in-person annual meeting was hosted at OISE, University of Toronto, in June 2022. The event was held over 2 days, in which time we saw presentations from Co-Leads, Co-Applicants, Next Generation Scholars, and Partners. The meeting was a great success and from it came various initiatives, including the Tapping the Tree series, to foster collaboration across the grant team and further the aims of the project.

To view the presentation recordings and digital posters created by Next Generation Scholars, click here. 

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.