TRU assistant professor Gloria Ramirez goes through some language exercises.
A TRU faculty member is bridging her two worlds and putting TRU on the international stage in language and literacy research.
Dr. Gloria Ramirez, an assistant professor of TRU’s Faculty of Human, Social and Educational Development, received a federal Insight Grant for about $75,000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to research aboriginal and non-aboriginal vocabulary enrichment.
What started as an eight-week pilot project in January has expanded into a two-year project and correlates with her research in her native country of Colombia.
“For people like me who already belong to these two worlds, it’s a great opportunity,” Ramirez said.
Her research focuses on literacy in the early stages of development and started with Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilingualism. “I compared two languages that are very different and I saw the same skills transfer,” she said. “Now we want to do the same with aboriginal children.”
Ramirez said children begin to develop vocabulary early on through immersion, but in the current educational model, they begin learning through reading when they reach Grade 4, often causing learning problems. She said by working with teachers in six classrooms within the North Okanagan School District to develop a more systematic way of engaging students in vocabulary early on, it will both aid in the transition to Grade 4 and in becoming bilingual.
If successful, she expects students to have better vocabulary, mental linguistic skills and reading comprehension.
“It’s a more explicit and systematic way of bridging commonalities between languages… (and) it is important at a theoretical level too, to understand all this global work, how these problems are related,” she said.
While her research has reached international strides, she said it is also important at a local level. “It’s a contribution of TRU to both the development and the acceleration of language and literacy sills in both aboriginal and non-aboriginal children.”
