How Does a Bilingual Environment Affect Language Development? – Milijana Buac

Milijana Buac

Language is a fundamental aspect of being human. Being able to understand and produce language allows one to create strong social and emotional bonds with friends and family and to fully participate in society.

It is therefore not surprising that when parents receive news that their young toddler may have a language disorder, they become worried and concerned.

According to Dr. Milijana Buac, this news may be problematic if the child is reared in a bilingual environment. “In my work, I noticed that the language-assessment tools were biased against bilingual children. They are biased because they were not normed using bilingual children but monolingual children.”

This is a problem because often the bilingual children score lower on these assessments when compared to monolinguals peers, sparking concerns of a delay.

“A low score by a bilingual child may not indicate a language disorder but just a language difference, reflecting the fact that they are learning two languages.” explained Buac.

A CISLL affiliate, Buac is on the faculty of the Speech-Language Pathology Unit housed within the Allied Health and Communicative Disorders Division within NIU’s College of Health and Human Sciences. Buac is a speech-language pathologist by training.

Using biased language-assessment tools is a problem potentially affecting many lives. In fact, 22% of children in the United States speak a language other than English at home.

Buac studies how a bilingual context affects language and cognitive development and how to make such language assessment tools less biased.

As one example of her research on language development, her dissertation used an eye-tracking visual world paradigm to examine how monolingual and bilingual children learn new words from non-native input.

In the visual world paradigm, participants are shown four unfamiliar objects on a screen. Each object is presented with a spoken presentation of a new “name” for each. The new name is a made-up word, so that it is unfamiliar to all participants. Later, participants are shown two of the objects and hear the word that was presented with one of them. Using an eye-tracker, the researcher measures whether and how quickly the child looks to the correctly-paired object. A shorter response delay and higher proportion of looks to the correct object indicates that the child has learned the new word.

In her dissertation, Buac was interested in how accents may impact the learning of new words. She presented the “names” in the visual world paradigm to typically-developing children in three different accents: native English, Spanish-accented English, and Korean-accented English.

The accents approximate how mono- and bilingual children may learn new words at home. English-Spanish bilingual children would be familiar with both native English and Spanish accents, whereas the monolingual children would only be familiar with the native English accent. Both types of speakers would be less familiar with the Korean accent.

She found that children living in a monolingual native English family learned new words best when presented by a native English-accented speaker, followed by a Spanish-accented English speaker, followed by a Korean-accented English speaker. However, children living in a bilingual environment showed no difference in learning between the native English and Spanish accents, and both of these led to higher learning than words presented in a Korean accent.

“The results showed that the familiarity of the accent matters. If you are familiar with the accent, then you learn new words faster than if you are not,” explained Buac. “I looked at learning because previous research has looked at how accents affect the time to process language but not on how accents affect learning.”

Buac is extending this research by looking at word learning in children who have a language impairment.

“The reason why I wanted to start with typically-developing children is to get a baseline. Now I would like to see if the accents are a greater impediment for children with a language disorder. A primary theory of language impairment assumes that the impaired individual has trouble processing spoken input. I would expect that children with a language disorder would be hindered even more than usual when presented with new words in an unfamiliar accent,” elaborated Buac.

As an expert in language disorders, Buac gets many questions from concerned parents.

In particular, she is often asked by parents of a child in a bilingual environment who have been newly diagnosed with a language disorder which language should be spoken at home.

“I tell them to speak which language they are most comfortable with. Never take away a language, because if a child is able to learn one language, they are going to be able to learn another. Parents often think it is better to stick to one language, let’s say English. But that could hinder the child if no one else in the family speaks English,” explained Buac.

As a new faculty member at NIU, Buac is busy planning future experiments and writing grants to fund research on how bilingual contexts affect language and cognitive development.

About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.

Even Brief Stints Abroad Help Students Learn a New Language- Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg

Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg

¿Hablas español? If your answer is “No”—would you like to?

Learning a new language opens up a whole new world of places, friends, experiences, and stories.

But we all know that learning a new language is not easy. That is why the courageous among us who do want to learn a new language often enroll in a foreign language (FL) course. The nice thing about taking a FL course is that you will most certainly learn—provided you pay attention in class, do the homework, and practice, of course. Watching foreign films over and over again with crossed fingers simply may not cut it.

But conventional wisdom says that the best way to learn a new language is to speak it every day with native speakers, surrounded by the language—that is, in an immersion setting.

Taking a three-hour-a-week course at your local college or university is likely not enough. Many students seeking “fluency” in a second language enroll in a study-abroad program, in which they take FL courses in a country where that language is spoken.

According to Dr. Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg, director of the Spanish Basic Language Program at NIU and FL learning researcher, many factors contribute to whether students will learn more studying abroad than studying at home. Moreover, it may be the case that study abroad impacts certain aspects of language development more than others.

“The research shows students who study abroad experience significant learning gains in measures of fluency—things like rate of speech and number of pauses—and also in pronunciation,” explained Faretta-Stutenberg.

However, according to Faretta-Stutenberg, the existing research is limited in two important ways.

The first is that the effect of immersion on the full spectrum of language learning is not well understood.

“Although fluency and pronunciation have been studied, very few studies have measured accuracy with regards to grammatical precision. For instance, do students who study abroad use verb tenses or other agreement structures accurately? Another understudied area is complexity. Students may be speaking more quickly, but are they using more complex or advanced structures than students who study a FL in their home country?” said Faretta-Stutenberg.

She argues that it is important to study the full gamut of language skills—fluency, accuracy, and complexity—because there are trade-offs between them. For example, someone might have high fluency but low accuracy. Someone else might be highly accurate but slow. If a researcher does not include the full range of skills in a single study then those trade-offs are not documented, and our understanding of the role of learning context in language development will be incomplete.

The second limitation of the existing research is that studies have been based primarily on study-abroad programs that last between a semester and a year. However, Faretta-Stutenberg points out that around 60% of study-abroad programs in the United States are classified as “short-term”—around 3-8 weeks in length—which falls substantially short of a semester, not to mention a full year.

In a recent study, she and her research team sought to address both of these limitations.

“We wondered whether there would be significant learning gains in a five-week study-abroad experience. Students expect that they will learn the language within that time frame but, frankly, the research has not been done,” explained Faretta-Stutenberg.

Faretta-Stutenberg collaborates with Janire Zalbidea at Temple University, and with Bernard Issa and Harriet Bowden at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Working with Drs. Issa and Bowden, Faretta-Stutenberg set out to find out what students learn when they study abroad for five weeks in Spain. Because initial proficiency and experience with a language are important predictors of whether or not students experience learning gains, students were divided into two groups. Students in one group only had two semesters of Spanish under their belt, whereas students in the other group had taken six semesters before they studied abroad.

Both before departing and upon their return to the U.S., students in both groups completed a version of the “elicited imitation task.” In the task, students listen to sentences in Spanish and repeat them aloud to the best of their ability. The sentences become increasingly longer and more complex, and learner accuracy is scored using a rubric, which results in an independent measure of overall proficiency.

Once the students arrived in Spain, they were tested using a grammaticality judgment task and a lexical decision task. The first required the students to judge whether sentences were grammatically correct and the second required a judgment of whether a series of letters formed a true word in Spanish. They were tested again on these measures right before they came home.

“These tests measured various aspects of accuracy. The grammaticality judgment task measured students’ sensitivity to violations of morphosyntax, while the lexical decision task measured their word knowledge. We were interested in going beyond measures of fluency in order to contribute to our understanding of the linguistic impacts of study abroad,” elaborated Faretta-Stutenberg.

Using hierarchical regression, the researchers held constant initial scores on the grammaticality judgment and lexical decision tasks to determine whether performance on elicited imitation pre-departure would predict learning gains on those tasks.

When they saw the results, Faretta-Stutenberg was stunned. “I was skeptical whether we would see learning gains in such a small amount of time, but we did. It was exciting!” she exclaimed.

They found that early-stage learners (the two-semester students) showed significant gains on both grammar and word knowledge, whereas the later-stage learners only showed significant gains on word knowledge.

“The different types of gains in the two groups probably reflected the focus of language instruction in the courses they were taking over there,” explained Faretta-Stutenberg.

Although the study found significant learning gains, Faretta-Stutenberg emphasizes that there is a lot of variability among learners and there are several factors at play.

For example, her research has found that greater reported use of the target language while abroad predicts gains in some language abilities. “This relationship between using the language and language gains supports the claim that immersion may increase learning—but also indicates that learner actions play an important role,” said Faretta-Stutenberg.

Faretta-Stutenberg is now focusing on other research questions, such as how the study-abroad experience impacts learning once students return to their home universities, and how long the learning effects in different domains last.

As for the rest of us, we might feel a bit better pulling out our checkbooks to pay for a five-week study-abroad experience. According to Faretta-Stutenberg’s research, it is likely that we (or our loved ones) can learn more of a language in a little over a month than you’d think.

¡Excelente!



About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.

Student Pairs May Be Key to Learning- Christine Malecki

CISLL affiliate Dr. Christine Malecki has a story to tell.

It starts in 1997 when Malecki was a practicing school psychologist in Iowa.

She wanted to help children learn how to write better using curriculum-based measurements (CBMs). Teachers use CBMs in their classrooms to assess students’ progress on a number of skills (reading, writing, arithmetic) fairly easily.

A CBM for writing might involve a student completing a prompt like, “One day I went for an airplane ride and…”. The teacher can score the response and keep a log of the student’s progress.

Here is where our story begins.

Malecki knew that there were different ways to score the writing CBM. A simple measure was just counting the number of words the student wrote. A more complex method would require calculating and summing scores based on grammatical accuracy or complexity (or another component of writing) across a number of words in the writing.

“The more complicated measure seemed like it would be more accurate, but it seemed cumbersome to do.” recounted Malecki.

When she joined the psychology faculty at NIU, she wondered whether the more complex scoring method was worth the effort.

Like any good scientist, she collected data. She and her graduate students timed how long it would take to score around 1,000 writing samples taken from first- through eighth-graders using both simple and complex methods.

“The more complex method took three times longer to score than the simpler method, but it only correlated more highly with standardized measures of writing for students beyond the fourth grade. Up to fourth grade, the simpler method was fine,” explained Malecki.

That finding in itself would save first- through fourth-grade teachers a lot of time grading.

But that finding wasn’t enough for Malecki.

“I remember a graduate student at the time wondering whether just having students write more often would increase writing skill,” mused Malecki. That would jibe with a lot of informal advice from professional writers—to improve your writing, just write more.

So Malecki and Jennifer Jewell, her graduate student, had students write either weekly or daily for several weeks.

Counter to the advice from professional writers, students who wrote weekly improved more than students who wrote every day.

“It was burnout. The students who wrote every day just got tired. In fact, many of them told us so in no uncertain terms in their writing samples,” laughed Malecki.

Yet the weekly writing assignment did increase writing skill, although perhaps not to the level of a professional novelist.

This gave another of Malecki’s students, Julie Alitto, an idea. Why not make a CBM assessment into an intervention? This was a fairly novel idea at the time.

So, in a new study, Alitto and Malecki had students write in one of two conditions. The practice-only condition wrote weekly in much the same way as students in the prior study. In a goal-and-feedback condition, the students were reminded about the goal to improve their writing and given feedback from their instructors.

As one might expect, giving students feedback and reminding them of their writing goals improved students’ writing skill more than just writing alone.

“We were pleased with the results, but teachers told us that it was just impractical to give feedback to each and every writing sample,” Malecki said.

Then Alitto got an idea.

Why not have students give feedback to one another?

Peer-mediated intervention (PMI) is when students give each other feedback in a structured environment.

Alitto tested the idea of using PMI to increase children’s writing skill, and her dissertation was born. In an experiment, she showed that using well-crafted worksheets, students working in pairs can give accurate feedback to their partner.

“It worked. Students’ writing improved as a function of peer-mediated intervention. I think it surprised many teachers who thought that having students grading each other was just an ‘easy way out’,’’ explained Malecki. The PMI research was published in the Journal of School Psychology by Malecki and former student Sammi Coyle, now a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

In fact, peer-mediated intervention has caught on in the education community. Students learn by receiving and giving feedback, and teachers can catch up on sleep rather than grading late into the night.

“There is definitely more research to be done to understand the boundary conditions of when PMI works and when it doesn’t,” said Malecki. For example, does it work for all ages? What components of PMI are most instrumental for change? Does it promote social skills?

Her story is not over, but a provisional ending seems appropriate.

Peer-mediated intervention may very well be instrumental to the future of education, one suited for both face-to-face and online courses, especially with massively open online courses (MOOCS). As the old saying goes, “No one learns more than the teacher.”

If you are an instructor wishing to try PMI in your classroom, Malecki has four suggestions for you:

• Identify and target your skill of interest, 

• Teach the students the routine of how to assess each other, presumably by using clear worksheets or guides,

• Think about how to pair students. Having two low-skilled students assessing each other may be problematic, and 

• Monitor the students’ behavior. They need to be on task. If you are interested in learning more about PMI, Malecki and Coyle have a chapter in an upcoming book, Peers as Change Agents, published by Oxford University Press. It is due out next summer. 

 

 

 
About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.

Crossing Lines in the Sand with AR Sandboxes: Nicole LaDue

Nicole LaDue and student Justin Moore

How many years ago did you last play in a sandbox? 20 years ago? 40 years?

For NIU Geology Professor Dr. Nicole LaDue, it was about a year ago.

However, LaDue’s recent experiences with sand are likely different than yours from your childhood.

For one thing, her sandbox is called an augmented reality (AR) sandbox. In this high-tech sandbox, an Xbox Kinect is placed over the sand facing down.

The Xbox Kinect sensor detects different elevations of the sand and sends that information to a computer which processes the data. A program then computes a 3D representation of the sand underneath and then computes a 2D representation from that information.

“It essentially computes a dynamic topographic map of the sand as a person manipulates the sand with their hands” explains LaDue. “A projector sends that information back onto the sand.”

A topographic map is a 2D representation of a 3D world. It uses lines to represent boundaries of the terrain which have the same elevation.

How do topographic maps represent elevation?

Imagine slicing off the top meter of a large pyramid by making a horizontal cut perpendicular to the Earth. Now image tracing the outline of that object on a huge piece of paper when placed in the center. You would get a square, right?

Now imagine taking another slice a meter down from the top of our (mutilated) pyramid and again trace it on the paper. And then repeat this process until you reach the ground.

What you would see on the paper?

You would see a series of concentric squares.

The number of and distance between the lines would tell you about the pyramid’s height and steepness. For example, if the distances between squares become larger towards the outer perimeter then that would suggest that the pyramid becomes flatter towards the base, similar to the Eiffel Tower. If some squares are more ragged than others then that would indicate damage or corrosion.

Topographic maps usually contain wavy lines and circles that represent mountain ranges, valleys, glacial deposits, and many other landscapes. People use this type of map to navigate while they are hiking and to develop plans for building roads and buildings.

“Learning how to read topographic maps is very difficult. We call it the ‘spatial hurdle’” said LaDue. “It is a symbolic system which requires a specific type of literacy to understand them.”

Here enters the wonderful world of AR sandboxes.

According to LaDue, there are over 600 of the AR Sandboxes across the country, located in museums, academic centers and other places of learning. They are relatively cheap to make since all you need is 300 pounds of sand, an old Xbox Kinect sensor, a computer and a projector. UC Davis provides the design plans and the computer code for free online.

“The prevailing belief is that projecting the lines onto the sand as the student manipulates the sand helps the student learn how to read topological maps. However, several previous research studies failed to demonstrate any learning gains in the classroom. We were the first ones to find a strategy for engaging students that helps them learn with the AR Sandbox.” mused LaDue.

LaDue, her M.S. student Justin Moore, Tom Pingel (now at VaTech) and colleague Tim Shipley (Temple University) tested whether it was important to project the lines onto the sand or whether projecting them onto a regular computer monitor beside the sandbox would suffice. The project was funded in part by a CISLL PoP grant awarded to LaDue, and a NIU Student Engagement Fund Project awarded to Pingel.

In their experiment, participants were first measured on their topographic map reading skills by taking a modified version of the Topographic Map Assessment (TMA). Then they manipulated the sand, with or without the presence of the AR lines serving as feedback. In addition, one-half of the participants saw the lines projected onto the sand versus a monitor. Then all participants once again took the TMA.

“Most groups saw improvement on the TMA. Surprisingly, however, having the lines projected on to the monitor produced larger learning gains than when they were projected onto the sand. This was exciting to learn because in all instances of AR sandboxes that I know of, the lines are projected onto the sand” marveled LaDue.

Why would projecting the lines onto a monitor be better than projecting them onto the sand?

“Essentially, the monitor helps because it is closer to a real topographic map than having lines projected onto the sand. They are both 2D representations” said LaDue.

Their results suggest that to help students learn topographic maps, the 600 or so AR sandboxes should display the lines onto a monitor in addition to the sand. “Students are excited to play with the sand and see the lines move in real time. But learning happens when they see how the mountains they build in the sand become a topographic map on the computer screen”, said LaDue.

In essence, cool toys can get people engaged with science, but keeping the game close to the learning outcome is what will make the toys educational.

LaDue hopes to replicate the study in a classroom and with a larger sample size.

“I credit being part of an interdisciplinary team for this project” said LaDue.

So next time you are playing in a sandbox, imagine those lines. Who knows, perhaps you will learn how to read a topographic map.

Learning a Language in the Virtual Wild: Iwona Lech

Iwona Lech

Learning a new language is difficult. Especially if you are an adult.

Of course, you probably already knew that.

According to Dr. Iwona Lech, recipient of CISLL’s Outstanding Graduate Student Award (COSSA) in 2017, students are dropping out of college-level foreign language courses at an unprecedented rate.

“It’s a real problem, especially in the last five to ten years,” said Lech.

In part, this problem sparked Lech’s interest in how to increase learning and engagement in college-level foreign language courses.

“The majority of the FL programs use a “grammar + vocabulary lists” approach, in which students learn lists of words and practice grammar rules as separate systems. They are then expected to connect the two into actual speech instances,” said Lech. “Since such skills require hours and hours of practice and additional input, language learning becomes a long and tedious journey that does not fit into a culture that celebrates immediate results. Learners achieve poor results and quickly lose interest, with only few determined enough to persevere.”

She noted that in Europe, many students teach themselves English through exposure to authentic uses of the language in virtual spaces, which she refers to as the “virtual wild”.

“English learners in Europe immerse themselves in the language in virtual worlds through reading the Web, watching original movies and television shows, and listening to music and podcasts,” elaborated Lech. “They also chat with strangers who are native English speakers through games, forums, blogs, or vlogs.”

Researchers call this phenomenon OILE (online informal learning of English), and are increasingly interested in the outcomes of this type of language learning and the ways it can be implemented in classrooms. Many explain OILE’s success through its incidental character—learners decide to engage in the activities because of their interest in a show, music, or game, and are largely unaware that learning takes place. They feel relaxed, engaged, and motivated.

This positive facet of OILE appeals to Lech. She is a proponent of positive psychology, a movement within psychology that encourages researchers to focus on the more positive side of the human condition.

“If OILE is indeed able to foster positive emotions, they, in turn, have the potential to broaden and build invaluable resources for learning a language, as per Barbara Fredrickson’s ‘broad and build’ theory of positive emotions,” explained Lech. “Removing one of the most limiting experiences in learning a new language, foreign language anxiety, could be a key solution to addressing the lack of retention in FL classes. Moreover, with today’s affordances of technology we can create immersion experiences for every language learner, despite geographical borders.”

So, if OILE is effective for Europeans learning English, could a similar approach be used for Americans learning a language other than English?

Lech attempted to find out.

For her dissertation, Lech randomly placed intermediate- to advanced-level German learners in an online German “class,” in either a traditional instruction condition or one based on OILE. In the “OILL” (online informal learning of language) condition, students were asked to find, read, listen to and watch authentic German on the Web.

She gave all participants in the experiment a pre-test, and those who completed 10 hours of engagement in the study took a post-test. She also administered an ESM (Experience Sampling Method) survey during learning sessions to find out participants’ emotions in the moment.

Unfortunately, so many people dropped out of the study it is difficult to interpret the results with any confidence.

Interestingly, the dropout did not appear to be random. Of 16 participants who completed the full 10 hours of the study, 12 had been randomly assigned to the OILL condition, whereas only four had been assigned to the experimental condition.

This pattern suggests that the OILL condition was more engaging for students than the traditional method and could potentially keep three times as many learners persevering to the end of an FL class.

Lech, who left NIU in 2018, is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Language and Culture Learning Center of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She is not done studying how to improve foreign language learning.

“I am continuing to analyze data that did not make it into my dissertation, such as measures of emotion that I collected during the duration of the study,” volunteered Lech. “I am confident we can teach languages better and increase interest in FL courses.”

A chapter by Lech that overviews her dissertation project appeared in the 2018 book, “Teaching Language and Teaching Literature in Virtual Environments,” edited by María Luisa Carrió-Pastor.

When Should We Leave Our Beliefs Behind?: Dylan Blaum

Dylan Blaum

Psychology graduate student Dylan Blaum has arguments on his mind.

But not in the way that most people think of when they hear the word ‘argument’. For example, he doesn’t imagine people yelling at each other about whether Justin Bieber is still cool.

Instead, Blaum thinks about arguments in much the same way that Monty Python had defined them in their “argument clinic” sketch so many years ago, namely as “a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.”

Granted, the sketch was much funnier than the definition.

However, the premise of the sketch is true: many people are not skilled in evaluating arguments and they need an argument clinic to help them to do so.

Consequently, Blaum spends his days thinking and researching how people evaluate arguments and the ways that educators can help others learn this skill.

“Evaluating arguments takes effort, knowledge and reasoning. Unfortunately, many people may not use these mental tools” explained Blaum. “In order to evaluate arguments, you need to establish whether the reason or reasons are true, and if they are, whether they support the conclusion or claim. Importantly, one should put their own personal beliefs aside and let the argument speak for itself. Otherwise, people will only believe things that they think are already true. They fall into ‘belief traps’.”

As an example, Blaum cites the website Reddit which contains a number of forums in which people share their beliefs and interpretations about topics and facts.

“People get stuck in their echo chamber when they converse with other like-minded individuals. Even when presented with facts and fairly good arguments that are inconsistent with their beliefs, people will do mental gymnastics to make them fit with theirs” explained Blaum. “People typically scrutinize an argument only when it goes against their beliefs. When it is consistent with their beliefs, they tend not to, even if the argument is poor.”

Failure to correctly evaluate arguments may lead people to believe any number of false or questionable ideas, like governmental conspiracies and cover-ups. At the extreme, such beliefs can lead to deadly consequences like the nation experienced in Charlotte and Pittsburgh over the past few years.

Blaum won the COSSA (CISLL’s Outstanding Student Scholar Award) for 2018-2019 based on his research on argumentation that he has conducted with his graduate advisor Dr. Anne Britt, and for his dissertation in which he is currently working on.

In his dissertation, he plans on giving flawed and unflawed arguments to students to rate on strength and quality. An example flawed argument would be “Marijuana should be legalized because it is a plant that grows naturally” whereas an unflawed argument would be “Marijuana should be legalized because it is less harmful than other already legal drugs.”

Having participants distinguish between flawed and unflawed arguments is called the flawed judgement task.

“Much prior research had people rate arguments on their strength, but the researchers in these studies appeared not to have clearly defined for their participants what ‘strength’ meant. So, for one half of my participants, I will tell them to evaluate whether the reason provides support for the claim. This will essentially give them a vital ingredient of what a good argument entails. For the other half, I will just have them rate them on strength without giving them a clear definition.”

Blaum hypotheses that by giving them a clear definition people will show an improvement on the flawed argument task because it gives them a mental schema of what an argument is.

Blaum is also testing the role of prior beliefs on argument evaluation.

“There is research which indicates that when people already believe in the general spirit of the argument, they do not see the flaws in the argument” Blaum explained. “This can lead to individuals furthering their beliefs without considering credible evidence to the contrary,” and possibly those deadly consequences mentioned earlier.

That is, for a person who already believes that marijuana should be legalized, the idea that marijuana is a naturally occurring plant is a good enough reason to believe that it should be. They think the argument is sound despite the fact that many naturally occurring plants are harmful if ingested, and the government does not knowingly legalize harmful actions.

“It will be interesting to see if their prior beliefs trump the potential positive impact of telling them what constitutes a good argument” mused Blaum. “if they do, then prior beliefs may reign supreme over reasoning.”

The findings from his dissertation may point towards ways in which citizens around the globe can be better judges of what they read and hear.

“It may not be like Monty Python’s argument clinic but people need to be more aware of why they hold certain beliefs. Getting them to understand the nature of arguments is a good beginning” added Blaum.

CISLL Celebrates Autism Acceptance Month - New Insights into How Children with Autism Learn Words: Allison Gladfelter

Allison Gladfelter

Does your pet Husky wear cool glasses?

CISLL’s Deputy Director Dr. Allison Gladfelter’s’ does.

However, her Husky is a stuffed animal which lives in her HUSKIES research lab (HUman Speech KInematics Experimental Studies) at NIU.  And the cool glasses are part of an infrared movement tracking system which directly captures how her research participants’ mouths move when they talk.

You see, Gladfelter studies word learning in children with autism. She uses the tracking system to measure the variability in lip and jaw movements when children speak. The glasses are connected to small round markers that are placed on the upper and lower lips and jaw and these detect movements which are recorded by a computer.

“I introduce the system on the Husky to show the children how they look and to put them at ease” laughed Gladfelter.

Children on the autism spectrum tend to repeat words and phrases in the exact same manner.

“This is one of the more debilitating characteristics of autism. Their repetitive speech patterns can cause them to stand out or sound unusual to others and severely curtails their social and work options” explained a more serious side of Gladfelter.

But Gladfelter has an idea.

Her idea comes from research in statistical learning. Statistical learning refers to a learner’s ability to attend to distributional information to extract meaning or structure from sensory input.

This body of research shows that variability during tasks of learning, rather than an adherence to a single pattern, is more beneficial for learning.

“Think about how to learn the perfect backhand swing in tennis. Conventional wisdom might say the best way is to practice the swing in the exact same way over and over again. However, research informs us that the best way is to vary the swing from one try to another.” Variability allows us to focus on what is common to different attempts, allowing us to distill the most important features, and this is true whether it is a tennis swing or the learning of the meaning of new words.

Gladfelter’s idea is that the variability of motor movements in the way children with autism speak may hold clues for how to improve their language learning in the future.

In her research, she has children with autism spectrum disorder and their typical peers learn and say new words. With her cool Husky glasses, she can measure precisely how their motor movements change from one attempt to the next.

“Based on my prior research, I expect to find a positive correlation between learning the meaning of new words and the amount of variability in motor movements when the child says new words over and over again” explained Gladfelter who is writing a federally-funded grant to test the hypothesis. Gladfelter encourages other researchers with expertise in repetitive behaviors in children with autism to reach out to her if they are interested in collaborating on this project.

If she does find a correlation, that doesn’t necessarily mean whether there is a causal link between motor variability and word learning, or the direction of causality if there is one. But one needs to establish a correlation before one can assess causation.

Depending on her findings, her research might point towards new ways that speech-language pathologists may help children with autism spectrum disorder. For example, the therapist might encourage more variety in the child’s speech productions during language learning tasks.

Practice makes perfect, as the old adage goes. But it might be more apt to say that variability during practice makes perfect.

And that goes for all Huskies, provided that they are not stuffed animals.

Are Reading Technologies Preventing the Blind from Reading?: Lindsay Harris

Lindsay Harris

You may not have noticed, but the number of people with severe visual impairments is on the rise.

Technology seems to be one reason why. Technology allows the youngest (premature babies) and the oldest of us to survive circumstances we previously would not have, but often at the expense of our eyesight.

Severe visual impairments prevent reading the way that most of us are used to – with our peepers.

One might think that if technology is a cause of rising rates of visual impairments, it might also be the answer to removing barriers to literacy for people with visual impairments. Indeed, there are many technologies that enable people with such visual impairments to access the same information as sighted individuals. These include screen readers and audiobooks.

However, in part because of these technologies, people with visual impairments are not learning Braille, the system of reading using raised dots on paper which correspond to letters, in the numbers they used to.

According to the National Federation of the Blind, fewer than 10% of the legally blind in the United States use Braille today. It is often considered much easier to use technology than to teach Braille.
This concerns CISLL’s Deputy Director Dr. Lindsay Harris, who specializes in word learning.

“When people read, they are strengthening the networks in the brain that encode word meanings,” explains Harris. “People who read a lot are able to experience more shades of meaning than people who do not, because more areas of the brain are wired into their mental dictionaries. Having richer “entries” in the dictionary allows them to become better readers.”

The reason is that they can place more attention on what is being described by the language and pay less attention to the words themselves.

Dr. Harris has been doing innovative research to answer the question, “If blind individuals are not reading, what consequences will there be on their knowledge of words and their language comprehension?”

In her recent research, sighted and blind individuals (who can read Braille) learn the definitions of rare words – essentially new words.

“We have sighted and blind participants read or hear a new word before they are given the definition. Research on sighted individuals show that reading a word helps them to learn its definition more easily than just hearing it.”

The reason is that when people read, they often experience hearing the words in their minds. But when people hear a word, they do not typically see the spelling in their heads to the same degree. Having both codes – phonological (word sounds) and orthographic (word spellings) – helps people find the definitions in memory. It is like finding your keychain in your purse; the more keys there are, the easier it is to find.

If blind individuals show the same pattern as sighted individuals—learning words more quickly when they are read versus when they are heard—then this could indicate that the visually impaired who do not read in favor of technology are losing some of those “shades of meaning” compared to individuals who read, and are potentially limiting the size of their vocabularies.

However, the results might show that blind individuals, unlike sighted individuals, do better when hearing the new words, because they tend to have superior verbal memory and phonological abilities.

“If the blind participants do better after hearing the words, then this would suggest that the newer technologies for the visually impaired are no cause for alarm with regards to language processing,” explained Harris.

Either finding will inform educational practices.

Unfortunately, we will have to wait until Dr. Harris finishes her research to find whether sighted and blind individuals show similar patterns of word learning.

Although she has already collected data from 17 sighted and 23 blind individuals, “I need more participants in my study,” says Harris. “One challenge of doing this research is finding blind individuals who read Braille.” She is hopeful that by the spring she will have enough data to begin analyses.

Dr. Harris is currently working on writing a federally funded grant to continue this and similar lines of research.

What’s Going on with Postsecondary Reading Instruction?: Norm Stahl

Norm Stahl

Literacy is a requisite for obtaining almost any type of post-secondary degree or certification.

If you are learning to be a plumber, for example, you will need to read to understand your local codes and regulations. If you are learning to be a nurse, you will need to read to acquire new techniques and procedures. If you want to be a lawyer, you will need to read about case law.

You get the idea: reading is important in education, and consequently, throughout one’s life.

However, not every student has the same level of reading skill. Many students who are identified as not being “college reading-ready” find themselves at a disadvantage in their courses, because almost all college courses require reading and, in many cases, the reading is difficult and technical.

But what is the best way for educators, students, and policy makers to help students read and understand course materials? What constitutes reading readiness for college? What are the literary demands placed on students?

According to Dr. Norm Stahl, Professor Emeritus and former chair of the Literacy Education Department at NIU, “We need to first understand the culture of reading and the reading demands in different classrooms and institutions in higher education. Such knowledge may help institutions prepare students for the reading rigors of their chosen occupational paths.”

Stahl, a founding member of CISLL, and his colleagues have recently completed a research project on just that: understanding education practices in developmental reading (DR) and career technical education (CTE) courses.

DR courses are designed to prepare students judged not to possess the literacy skills necessary to achieve academic success in community college- or university-level classes, such as CTE and General Education (GE) courses.

CTE courses, which are primarily offered at community colleges, prepare students for certificates and degrees in technical and professional fields (e.g., criminal justice, welding, business, culinary arts, etc.). GE courses at a four-year-college make up the foundation of an undergraduate degree, before students take upper-level classes in their chosen major.

Stahl’s study was completed with Dr. Sonya Armstrong, another CISLL alumnus who is now at Texas State University.

Other contributors include Dr. James King from the University of South Florida, Dr. M. Joanne Kantner from Kishwaukee College, Dr. Mary Perkins from Elgin Community College, Betsy Sobin from Illinois Valley Community College, and Ruth Dalrymple from Texas State University.

“We wanted to know how literacy is addressed in both DR and CTE classrooms. This is important because in some cases, students who are deemed to have lower literacy skills are placed in DR courses either as prerequisites to, or concurrently with, CTE courses. We need to know how these courses relate to and align with each other in order to best help the students succeed,” remarked Stahl.

In the study, DR and CTE instructors and students at three community colleges were interviewed and surveyed on a number of topics, including how literacy demands are met in their respective courses. In addition, observational data were collected in multiple CTE and DR classes. Data analysis focused on the concerns, attitudes, challenges, and practices regarding the culture of reading and reading instruction in each setting.

One important finding that emerged from the study was that there was little curricular alignment between DR and CTE courses. For example, many DR instructors appeared not to know that the reading demands in CTE courses can be heavy.

“It’s difficult to advance as an educational community in such a silo-like environment, in which instructors in these two areas know little of what the other is doing,” explained Stahl.

The researchers also found differences in course formats and text types. DR classes tended to use discussion and multiple types of texts (such as novels and workbooks), whereas CTE courses tended to have a lab/shop format with a single textbook (such as a technical manual) that is used across multiple semesters.

But faculty of DR and CTE courses shared some attributes, such as feeling like second-class citizens in the institution.

They also both perceived students’ attitudes towards reading as negative, despite that more than half of the students reported reading at least 75% of the course material.

Both types of instructor also tended to treat reading as a fairly monolithic skill, believing that the same reading strategies can be used across courses and disciplines. However, DR instructors, in an attempt to prepare students for a variety of GE courses, did utilize more discipline-specific, content-field literary practices. 

In contrast, instructors in CTE courses rarely veered away from a monolithic view of reading.

In fact, believing their students to be largely aliterate, many CTE faculty used “work-arounds” to help their students understand the course material because they assumed texts would simply go unread. These work-arounds included PowerPoint slides, instructor-prepared lecture notes, and study guides.

Based on their results, the authors posit some recommendations for educational practice, research and scholarship, including: 

• Promote and maintain greater communication across programs. DR instructors need to know about the literary demands in CTE courses, and CTE instructors should know the goals and limitations of DR courses.


• Develop contextualized reading courses. Reading instruction should be based on the texts used in the courses, including those in CTE courses.


• Consider CTE traditions in developing student learning outcomes. Institutions should recognize the literacies and learning approaches in CTE courses and incorporate them into developing instructional student learning outcomes.

You can read the full list of recommendations in the fullreport.

Notes:

Dr. Stahl is an expert on literacy who has authored over 125 publications, served on numerous advisory boards, and been elected to governing positions within several professional organizations. 

Dr. Stahl will speak about this project during a Show-and-Share to be held Friday, February 22 at 3:00 in room 506 of the Holmes Student Center. Other speakers at that event will be Dr. Alecia Santuzzi, the Director of Research Methodology Services, and Dr. Kristine Wilke, the Director of the Jerry L. Johns Literacy Clinic.

How to Build a Better Scientist: Anne Britt & Amanda Durik

Amanda Durik

Anne Britt

To help protect our planet, scientists need to know the behavior and consequences of disturbances in complex systems, such as hurricanes, climate change, and infectious diseases. This is no small task since there are potentially dozens of variables to account for, and these variables may interact in complicated, dynamic and nuanced ways.

Established scientists know how to construct and test models of disturbances to the environment, but what is the best way to teach their methods to aspiring young scientists?

One might think it is just memorizing individual articles and formulae, similar to a recipe. However, that can only go so far. One must creatively combine, integrate and shift through the results of past measurements and individual research findings in order to make and test predictions.

Indeed, one can get blown away with the complexities of understanding the effects of major events like hurricanes.

Here enters CISLL affiliate Dr. Amanda Durik and CISLL Director Dr. Anne Britt. They are Co-PIs’ on a $2.7 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate how best to teach middle school students the process of constructing and evaluating evidence-based explanations regarding the effects of large scale disturbances. Dr. Steven McGee from The Learning Partnership heads the interdisciplinary team.

Durik summarizes what students do this way: “Students are given long term ecological data on hurricane effects in Puerto Rico since 1989. Students read texts about different species that live in the area and how hurricanes affect the prey, predators, canopy, moisture, etc. Then they use this knowledge to create and test a model of the effects of hurricanes on the population of that species using the simulations of hurricane disruption data.”

But how is this different from what is usually done in the classroom?

“Students get overloaded with information and start making mistakes and often disengage,” Britt observes. “Students need to develop a task model to understand the reason why they are engaged in a particular task and how that task will contribute to the primary goal of explanation.”

Britt and Durik apply their new model of reading called RESOLV (REading as Problem SOLVing) to frame the tasks to help students organize their learning. The task model is important for helping students carry important information from one task to the next.

Britt and Durik will be co-designing the instructional curriculum with middle school teachers in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS).

Over 6000 students will directly benefit from participation in the research program.

Grant specifics: McGee (Principal), Durik, A. M. (Co-PI), and Britt, M. A. (Co-PI), for "Collaborative Research: Developing a Generalized Storyline that Organizes the Supports for Evidence-based Modeling of Long-Term Impacts of Disturbances" Sponsored by National Science Foundation, Total: $2,748,854 (NIU Subaward: $416,647). July 2018 – June 2022).