About

Welcome to UCLA's Language and Literacy Research Group! If you are a researcher, educator, policy maker, or prospective student interested in issues of language and literacy development, we encourage you to explore the current research being conducted by our students and faculty advisor, as well as our upcoming professional events and activities.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Developmental psychology
• Social psychology
• Pedagogy

Selected publications

• Washback of standards-based assessment with school-age language learners

  2025-06-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The focus of this chapter is standards-based language assessment and washback on language teaching and learning with school-age English/multilingual learners (EL/ML students) primarily in the United States. Federally mandated standards for English language development or proficiency are the linchpin for the alignment amongst expected language skills, expected academic content knowledge, content of language assessments, and curricula. US states are required to use large-scale standards-based English language proficiency assessments (ELPA) for accountability purposes, and classroom-level standards-based assessments can be used to more closely monitor progress and guide instruction. Standards-based ELPA are integral to a theory of action for standards-based language assessment to close persistent gaps in the opportunity to learn and achieve between EL/ML learners, who are traditionally underserved in US schools, and their monolingual, English-speaking peers. Evidence of positive washback includes improved test scores, on-time graduation rates, and closer alignment between classroom assessment and large-scale ELPA. Unintended, often negative consequences, however, include inappropriate retention of students in specialised language programs and constraints on access to advanced college preparation courses. The chapter concludes with recommendations for further washback research on current assessments and ideas for the revision and augmentation of standards.

  PublisherDOI

• Translanguaging: Conceptual underpinnings of equity-oriented instructional and assessment practices with adolescent multilingual learners

  Linguistics and Education · 2025-03-30 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The empirical papers in this Special Issue operationalize translanguaging in the context of diverse instructional and assessment practices with adolescent multilingual students. The different conceptualizations that guide their research questions, analyses and interpretations are described and connections between them and the current literature on translanguaging and other relevant fields are made. Additional aspects of the translanguaging construct as it relates to both equitable educational practices and the specifics of adolescent learners are then raised. These considerations include the reciprocal relationships between developments during adolescence and translanguaging practices, and how a translanguaging lens can help reveal the ways instruction and assessment can be asset-based, authentic and valid for adolescent multilingual learners.

  PublisherDOI

• Surveying the Use of Story Stems and Symbolic Play Across the Lifespan in Quantitative Research

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-04-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract With a ninety-year history, the use of narrative story completions and symbolic play methods with children and adults has long been widespread among researchers and practitioners in clinical psychology and in developmental and cognitive research. It is now growing in popularity among educators and social workers. Central to research that uses story completion measures is the assumption that the mental worlds of children and adults are readily accessible through story prompts and the representations of self and others reflected in the story completion responses, including that the mental construct projected by the story stem can be quantified and evaluated. This chapter provides an overview of narrative story stem methodologies (NSSM), including those that are supported by doll play, and the quantitative studies that have used them to examine a wide range of meaning-making processes and developmental functioning and outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Addressing Bias in Spoken Language Systems Used in the Development and Implementation of Automated Child Language‐Based Assessment

  Journal of Educational Measurement · 2025-04-23

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article addresses bias in Spoken Language Systems (SLS) that involve both Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and reports experiments to improve the performance of SLS for automated language and literacy‐related assessments with students who are under served in the U.S. educational system. We frame bias in SLS in terms of testing fairness and validity, stemming in part from the exclusion of sufficiently large training datasets in varieties of English other than General American English (GAE). We adopt an Interpretation/Use Argument approach to validity focused on clarity of constructs and scoring accuracy. While SLS use ASR to automatically transcribe students’ utterances, and apply NLP algorithms to ASR transcripts to measure students’ speech samples, it is well‐documented in studies with adults that ASR is typically more problematic for African American English (AAE) speakers than for other groups due to differences in prosody, pronunciation, word usage, and grammar. We utilized child speech and text corpora to improve algorithms that score oral task responses for child AAE speakers and, in some experiments, children with oral language and reading difficulties. Favorable results provide impetus and possible solutions for fair and inclusive assessments for diverse student groups in the future.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Equity and methodological advancements to transform academic discourse teaching and research: introduction to the special issue

  Linguistics and Education · 2025-02-04 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Commentary for the Special Issue on Equity and Methodological Advancements to Transform Academic Discourse Teaching and Research. Finding Common Ground: The path forward for building teacher and student capacity for academic discourse and student success

  Linguistics and Education · 2025-04-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to the Special Issue on Classroom Assessment

  Educational Assessment · 2025-04-03

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The JIBO Kids Corpus: A speech dataset of child-robot interactions in a classroom environment

  JASA Express Letters · 2024-11-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper describes an original dataset of children's speech, collected through the use of JIBO, a social robot. The dataset encompasses recordings from 110 children, aged 4-7 years old, who participated in a letter and digit identification task and extended oral discourse tasks requiring explanation skills, totaling 21 h of session data. Spanning a 2-year collection period, this dataset contains a longitudinal component with a subset of participants returning for repeat recordings. The dataset, with session recordings and transcriptions, is publicly available, providing researchers with a valuable resource to advance investigations into child language development.

  PublisherDOI

• Bilingual oral language development among dual language immersion students: Use of a Bayesian approach with language learning progressions

  Applied Psycholinguistics · 2024-04-11

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The dual language development of dual language immersion (DLI) students, although often examined at the domain level (e.g., listening or reading), remains understudied for more specific skills (e.g., word, sentence, or discourse). This study examines the eleven-month progression of oral language skills in a picture description task in two languages (French and English) for early-elementary (Transitional Kindergarten through first grade) DLI students ( N = 42). Using Bayesian methods, which estimate parameters using both the data and prior information, we describe French and English growth patterns as measured by learning progressions whose focus is on language features at the word, sentence, and discourse levels. For French oral language, we found evidence of meaningful positive linear growth for all language features, whereas for English oral language, meaningful linear positive growth was only detected for sophistication of topic vocabulary. Overall, coming from a French-speaking household was associated with steeper French oral language trajectories, but coming from an English-only household did not specifically impact English oral language trajectories. In both languages, grade level influenced the trajectories of some—but not all—features. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications, advocating for a language progression approach in instruction and research on bilingualism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Self-concept in first grade and academic performance trajectories: roles of gender and dual-language immersion versus English-medium program enrollment

  International Multilingual Research Journal · 2024-08-28 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nettie Boivin

  36 shared

• Valentina Carbonara

  University for Foreigners of Siena

  36 shared

• Junko Matsuzaki Carreira

  Tokyo Keizai University

  36 shared

• Chiou-hui Chou

  National Tsing Hua University

  36 shared

• Yuko Goto Butler

  36 shared

• Becky H. Huang

  The Ohio State University

  16 shared

• Frances A. Butler

  15 shared

• Anna V. Osipova

  California State University Los Angeles

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• Bobbie and Mark Greenfield Distinguished Faculty Award (UCLA…
• Haynes Foundation Faculty Fellow
• The Harold and Lois Haytin Award (UCLA)
• Ann C. Rosenfield Distinguished Community Partnership Prize,…
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Speech and Hearing Scienc…