Carla Zayas-Santiago, a graduate research assistant in the Rightpath Research and Innovation Center within the Department of Child and Family Studies and a doctoral student in the Technology in Education and Second Language Acquisition (TESLA) program in the USF College of Education, presented at the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) conference, held Oct. 8鈥�11.
Carla Zayas-Santiago shares her research.
Zayas-Santiago was awarded a SREE graduate student travel grant to attend the conference in Chicago, where she participated in the organization鈥檚 "In-the-Pipeline" series, showcasing works in progress by emerging scholars.
Her proposal, titled "CLAN-Derived Measures of Linguistic Complexity and Vocabulary Diversity as Indicators of Language Production Growth: A Pilot Study of 4th Grade Spanish-Speaking ELs in Remote Synchronous Vocabulary Instruction," stems from her role as a graduate research assistant on the federally funded Institute of Education Sciences (IES) study (IES Grant R305A200047). The project is led by Mar铆a Carlo, PhD, associate professor in the Rightpath Research and Innovation Center, in collaboration with Sara A. Smith, PhD, associate professor in the College of Education at the University of 91社区.
The broader study investigates the effects of bilingual versus monolingual methods of explicit English vocabulary instruction on fourth-grade, Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs). Zayas-Santiago's pilot focuses on the use of CLAN (Computerized Language ANalysis) software to analyze student speech for linguistic complexity and vocabulary diversity.
The study aims to determine whether these CLAN-derived measures can serve as reliable indicators of English proficiency and whether they reflect measurable growth over six weeks of remote, one-on-one instruction.