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.

The LLRLab is currently seeking adult participants for a study on the relationship between music and reading. If you are interested in participating, email Lindsay 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!

Great news in the recent round of SSHRC doctoral fellowships: our incoming PhD student, Lindsay Heggie, has scored a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Congratulations, Lindsay! Start as you mean to go on!

Congratulations to Lesly, who, along with her collaborators Hélène Deacon and John Kirby, recently won the United Kingdom Literacy Association’s Wiley-Blackwell Research in Literacy Education Award for their article, Flexibility in young second-language learners: examining the language specificity of orthographic processing.

Congratulations to all three!

Chris’s dissertation work has been garnering some media attention of late… here’s a link to an article on Thunder Bay Newswatch detailing some of the preliminary findings from the Thundery Bay Catholic District School Board project.

Stay tuned for more articles on the subject!

Congratulations to Laura Steacy, who successfully defended her thesis, Timing is everything: Early identification and the Double Deficit Hypothesis back in December to receive her Master of Education. Since finishing her degree, Laura has quickly been snapped up by a school and so has returned to teaching. Whether she will share with her students the ins and outs of differential statistics remains to be seen.

All the best from the lab to Laura!

Congratulations to Chris Mattatall, this year’s recipient of the R. J. Wilson Thesis/Dissertation Development Award! The Assessment and Evaluation Group (AEG) in the Faculty of Education made the decision, based on Chris’s efforts to improve the use of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) data in schools and to support teachers in meeting the needs of young struggling readers.

Congratulations, Chris!

In honour of the new year, here is an interesting language- and literacy-related link for you to check out: in search of the most difficult language. The Economist does a little linguistic investigation. Interesting!

This is a photo from this year’s lab holiday event, Chrismukkah 2009. We played Texas hold ‘em dreidel, ate a turducken, and had a hilarious gift exchange.

All the best in 2010, from us to you!

The other day, some lab members ordered sushi for delivery while we were hard at work. Can you spot what makes this is the best receipt we’ve ever gotten?