Newly funded RCT. Postdoctoral scholars will have an opportunity to be involved in a newly funded large randomized control trial (RCT) study in partnership with the Regional Educational Laboratories (REL) Southeast. This project is scheduled to launch training in Summer 2018 with implementation in 47 classrooms of 5th grade students during the 2018-2019 school year in a partnering school district. This RCT study provides opportunities to describe the morphological and academic vocabulary knowledge of students from low resource backgrounds, including English Learners, and examine the effects of intensive word knowledge instruction delivered in 20 weeks of instruction.
Extant Data. Our lab also provides access to extant data including language and literacy skill of Spanish-English speaking children in kindergarten and first grade from the BLOOM grant. BLOOM: Bridging for Language Outcomes in the Classroom is a project designed to develop and refine an adaptive tiered vocabulary intervention that can be applied reliably and effectively for Spanish-speaking ELLs in KG-1st grade classrooms. The intervention took place within authentic learning environments. Assessments included standardized measures of vocabulary, nonverbal cognitive ability (PTONI), and oral language and literacy measures (e.g. BESA, Narrative samples, Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests). An article reporting the main findings is in-press in Journal of Speech Language Hearing and Research. Intensive vocabulary instruction with bridging to first language embedded in e-books yielded significant effects on English Learner’s vocabulary growth compared to shared reading without embedded vocabulary instruction. The proximal effect on English labeling was robust across all quantiles regardless of children’s initial English vocabulary. The distal effect on the standardized assessment of receptive English vocabulary was stronger for children who started with greater English knowledge. E-book delivered intervention with bridging to Spanish was feasible for monolingual personnel to implement in classrooms without access to bilingual implementers.
The child language and literacy lab provides postdoctoral opportunities for specialized research experience in implementation of an RCT study, fidelity of implementation tools, data management, and analyses of large datasets in partnership with REL Southeast. Postdoctoral scholars will also have extensive opportunities to dissemination of findings related to the word knowledge intervention study.