Welcome to the website of the Language and Literacy Research Laboratory at Queen’s University, Faculty of Education. This lab conducts research in reading development and reading difficulties, focusing on three main areas: linguistic stress, early intervention for struggling readers, and reading development in second language learners. We receive most of our funding from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council.

We are a busy lab with a number of active students from the faculties of Education, Psychology, and Linguistics. If you are a parent, teacher, or principal who has been approached as a partner in research, please check out our Frequently Asked Questions for more information about the kind of work we do with students in elementary schools and daycares.

Last Friday the ladies in the lab took some time away from their work to celebrate… at the Education grad student prom! (Just kidding, it wasn’t the prom. It was the end of year social event, though — hosted by the Education Graduate Students Society.) We had a great dinner, won some prizes, and spent time with other grad students we hardly get to see during the busy school year. What a fun Friday night! Thanks to the EGSS for hosting.

BIG congratulations to our supervisor, Dr. Lesly Wade-Woolley, who found out today that she was awarded an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council! Her co-investigators on the grant are Dr. Clare Wood, Dr. Linda Jarmulouwicz, and Dr. Andrew Holliman. Congratulations and cake all around!

We just got word from our building’s custodian that there was a bat sighting earlier today, just outside the lab! A sleepy bat, a rude awakening, and a trip to emerg later, the bat is now at the hospital being tested for rabies and our custodian is just fine.

What a perfectly thematic thing to happen in the year of our Batman Study!

Last week, the members of the LLRLab had an evening out… dinner at the Grad Club followed by the finals of the 3-minute Thesis competition! We were all in awe of the impressive communication and presentation skills of the competitors, many of whom boiled down years of work (including results and implications!) to fewer than three minutes! We had no idea how they would pick a winner from so many fantastic competitors, but were thrilled (and on our feet cheering!) when Xiaoqian Liu from our very own Faculty of Education was declared the winner!

You can bet we’ll be at the provincials (conveniently held here at Queen’s) on April 18!

Funny orthographically, but the resulting stress shift with the movement of the hyphen kind of takes the punch out of this one. Still… our kind of joke!

After three intense weeks of data collection, the LLRLab is pleased to say that we’re full! We had such a great response again this year — thank you to all the B.Ed. students who took time out of their very busy schedules on campus to support the Batman Study and our research!

Thank you as well to the elementary school teachers and school administrators who supported our pilot study. With their help, we were able to be quick and efficient with minimal interruptions to class time — always the best kind of in-school research!

We’re also proud of the M.Ed. candidates (and a certain Honours Psych student) who worked as RAs on the project — they really went above and beyond, putting in long days to make sure we could reach our participant goal in the allotted time!

Lab love all around!

Are you an adult who is a native speaker of English? Are you interested in supporting educational research? Then participate in our Batman Study on reading fluency and reading comprehension!

WHAT: We are examining prosody’s role in reading fluency, and the relationship between reading with expression and reading comprehension.

WHERE: On West Campus or Main Campus (Stauffer Library)

WHEN/HOW MUCH TIME: Two one-hour sessions sometime in January or February.

COMPENSATION: You will receive a total of $30 for your time!

To sign up, contact the LLRLab at lab@langlitlab.ca or by phone at 613-533-6000 extension 77425.
NOTE: We were having trouble with our email but it’s fixed now! You can email us!

After a brief hiatus, the Language and Literacy Research Lab website is back! We’re working on getting it updated and back to its former glory. Stay tuned for information on our lab, its students, the current research we’re doing, as well as a summary of what we learned last year during our investigation of music and reading.

It’s good to be back!

The LLRLab is currently seeking adult participants for a study on the relationship between music and reading. If you are interested in participating, email the lab to sign up! Participation means that you’ll be scheduled for two one-on-one sessions, each of which will last no more than an hour. You don’t have to be a musician to participate — just liking music more than qualifies you!

Great news! Our Ph.D. candidate Chris Mattatall has been hired as Assistant Professor of Special Education at Memorial University! He will defend his dissertation this summer and then he and his family will move out East. We’re absolutely thrilled for him and wish him all the best!