Spanish-Language Narration and Literacy: Culture, Cognition, and Emotion

Allyssa McCabe, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She founded and co-edits the journal Narrative Inquiry and has researched how narrative develops with age, the way parents can encourage narration, cultural differences in narration, as well as interrelationships between the development of narrative, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. She is the recipient (with L. S. Bliss and A. Covington) of the Editor's Award from Contemporary Issues in Communication Science and Disorders, presented at the 1999 Annual Convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, San Francisco, CA, for the article "Assessing the Narratives of African American Children." Her current work concerns a theoretical approach to early literacy called the Comprehensive Language Approach, which looks at ways that the various strands of oral and written language affect each other in the acquisition of full literacy. With Lynn Bliss, she most recently published Patterns of Narrative Discourse: A Multicultural Lifespan Approach. Alison Bailey, Ed.D., is Associate Professor and a former Division Head of the Psychological Studies in Education Program in the Department of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, in addition to being a faculty associate researcher for the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST). A graduate of Harvard University, Dr. Bailey's research focuses primarily on language and social communicative development, English language development in second-language learners, early narrative and literacy development, and language assessment. She serves on the advisory boards of the California Department of Education, the consortia of numerous other states, and commercial publishers developing language and literacy assessments for English learners. Dr. Bailey is co-author of the new PreK-K IPT Assessment of English Language Development, editor and contributing author to The Language Demands of School: Putting Academic English to the Test, and co-author with Margaret Heritage of Formative Assessment for Literacy K-6: Building Reading and Academic Language Skills across the Curriculum. Gigliana Melzi, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Dr Melzi obtained her doctoral degree from Boston University and later published articles and chapters focusing on the early literacy and language development of Spanish-speaking Latino children living in the U.S. and in their countries of origin. In one line of research, she has investigated through qualitative methodologies the daily literacy activities of immigrant parents and their impact on children's school performance. She also conducted studies on various discourse and linguistic features of Spanish-speaking mother-child dyads from non-immigrant and immigrant Latin American families across various socioeconomic groups. Currently, Dr Melzi is funded by the National Institute of Health and the Administration for Children and Families for her work on educational involvement of Latino Head Start families. She is also a co-investigator in other funded projects housed in New York University's Medical School and the Center for Research in Culture, Development and Education, which examine numerous factors influencing Latino children's academic engagement and performance.