KAMLOOPS – Thompson Rivers University education professor Dr. Lynne Wiltse has been awarded a $50,884 research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to improve the academic literacy of intermediate students in Kamloops’ inner-city schools.
The three-year research project, Creating Third Spaces for Minority Language Learners in a School-University-Community Research Collaboration, will build upon a pilot project conducted during the past school year. TRU education students from Wiltse’s Language and Literacy courses were paired with students from an inner-city school in two literacy projects.
“There have been several initiatives addressing the issue of improving literacy for ‘at-risk’ primary students,” explained Wiltse. “However, studies show students who make gains through these early interventions often experience difficulty with academic literacy during the intermediate grades (4-7), fueling the phenomenon known as the ‘fourth grade slump.’ In these grades, vocabulary and concepts in content areas such as science become more complex.”
“It is a great honour for a researcher to receive a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council,” said TRU’s associate vice-president of research and graduate studies, Dr. Nancy Van Wagoner. “These are among the most competitive awards in Canada.”
“Lynne’s work exemplifies the importance of TRU research to the community, and the close, if not inseparable, connection between university teaching and research,” she added.
Wiltse, who received a teaching excellence award from the university in May, explained that the study will examine ways to merge the out-of-school literacy resources with school literacy practices for intermediate-aged Aboriginal and other non-mainstream students in an inner-city school in Kamloops.
The grant supports one of 841 new university-based research projects funded in Canada by SSHRC and was recently announced by the agency’s president Chad Gaffield, who received an honorary doctorate from TRU earlier this month.
For more information contact:
Dr. Lynne Wiltse at 250.371.5565 or by email.
