The ultimate goal of research is to support multilingual children’s learning and development by contributing to the knowledge base on their language, literacy, academic, and socioemotional development.
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Our first line of inquiry concerns the identification of malleable factors that influence multilingual children’s learning and development. The goal of this line of research is to provide insights into the theories of change and the development of evidence-based early interventions that can improve learning outcomes in bilingual children.
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In addition to using behavioral measures to study early literacy development, we also focus on learners’ neural substrates underlying early language and literacy development. My research agenda involves investigating the intricacies of neural pathways and cognitive processes that are instrumental in early learning and development.
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Our third line of inquiry centers on refining theories of bilingualism and biliteracy. Over the past decades, theories of cross-language transfer have widely focused on the transfer from a single linguistic skill in one language to that same linguistic skill in another language. For example, reading skills in one’s first language transfer to reading skills in the second language. I contribute to theories of bilingual literacy development by proposing the Transfer Integration Hypothesis (Shen, in press*)*, which posits that first and second language skills are interrelated across linguistic modalities (e.g., reading and writing). This hypothesis is the first step towards a pedagogical literacy framework for facilitating cross-language (i.e., first and second language), cross-modal (i.e., reading and writing) transfer, which will inform interventions to better support early literacy development for multilingual children
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