The Bilingual Biliteracy Research Lab at Queens College is under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Ijalba, Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Communication Disorders. The research of this lab focuses on the needs of bilingual-multicultural populations, with a primary emphasis on the Latino and pan Asian-American communities.
Research interests at the Bilingual Biliteracy Research Lab at Queens College are: 1. First and second language acquisition in typically and atypically developing children 2. Comparing early literacy practices in bilingual-bicultural communities 3. Characteristics of language and reading disorders in children from bilingual backgrounds 4. Crosslinguistic factors influencing reading and the learning of English as a second language 5. Intervention strategies and materials that support language acquisition in children with communication disorders
The primary focus of our lab is to learn from the language experiences of the diverse population living in NYC. Our main areas of interest are bilingualism and literacy in developing and in mature individuals from different language backgrounds.
Work in our lab particularly exposes students to the needs and experiences of bilingual individuals: parents raising bilingual children with language disorders, early literacy beliefs and practices in different populations, shifts in first and second language learning through the school years, phonological and orthographic processing among bilingual readers, and bilingual assessment of language and reading skills.
Our lab is open to students from other departments. Speech-language pathology is an interdisciplinary subject and as such, we welcome students interested in applied research in bilingualism and biliteracy.
We meet approximately once every three weeks as a group or individually with Dr. Ijalba to work on specific projects. Please contact elizabeth.ijalba@qc.cuny.edu if you are interested in joining us at any time.
