Projects
Current
Oral language development through drama: Practitioner needs and perspectives (2024-2025) [PI]
Building on the development of a large-scale drama-based oral language intervention, this project will involve focus groups with practitioners to: (1) investigate their practices and beliefs concerning the use of drama-based activities for oral language development, (2) identify their needs and challenges experienced as they endeavour to incorporate drama into their teaching, and (3) further our understanding of how they perceive the potential impact of drama-based activities on students' oral language skills and overall academic performance. The project is funded by a Small Grant offered by the Oxford Department of Education. You can read more about it on the CreATE Research Group website.
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Exploring the use of languages in a multilingual rehearsal room (2022-present) [PI]
While bilingual ‘code-switching’ has been examined from a cognitive and linguistic perspective, the investigations on its social function in authentic communication contexts remain limited. This project aimed to fill this gap by investigating the role of code-switching among bilingual actors. Focusing on a London-based multilingual theatre group, it involved 20 hours of observation of rehearsals, which were tagged for instances of code-switching, as well as interviews with some of the multilingual theatre-makers (performers and creatives) that formed part of the group. By thematically analysing the data collected, the project can offer an understanding of how theatre-makers use their linguistic repertoires in practice, and provide recommendations for the training of multilingual actors and the production of multilingual shows.
Completed
Improving the oral language skills of children with English as an Additional Language through a drama-based intervention (2022-2023) [PI]
This project aimed to develop and test an intervention for improving EAL children’s oral language skills in English through theatre – a medium that seems well-suited to developing oral language, but whose potential has not been evaluated to date. It involved multiple phases (including a systematic review of the literature, knowledge exchange workshops with stakeholders, creative material design with theatre practitioners, and the collection of evaluation data). The project was funded by the John Fell Fund (Oxford University Press). You can read more about it on the CreATE Research Group website. You can read more about the project in the Oxford Education Deanery website, and find a booklet containing 15 activities used in the intervention in the Department of Education website. A manuscript detailing the pilot study was published in First Language and can be accessed here.
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The role of crosslinguistic influence in Greek child and adult learners' acquisition of English (2017-2021) [DPhil Project]
My doctoral project explored the causes and effects of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) through in Greek learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Two experiments investigated CLI in Greek-English sequential bilingual children (attending English monolingual or Greek-English bilingual immersion programmes in Greece): Experiment 1 focused on the use of sentential subjects, while Experiment 2 targeted the use of subordinate clause markers. A third experiment explored CLI in Greek adult learners of EFL. The project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The DPhil thesis can be dowloaded from here. Moreover:
- A book chapter on oral language elicitation tasks that was based on piloting work for the project can be found here.
- A book chapter on EAL children's lexical and grammatical development that was based on the literature review conducted for the project can be accessed here.
- A paper on the lexical and grammatical outcomes of the bilingual immersion and monolingual immersion participants relative to age-matched monolingual Greek and English peers can be found here.
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Setting research priorities for English as an Additional Language (2020-2021) [RA]
The goal of this project was to give stakeholders of English as an Additional Language (EAL) research (i.e., educators, parents and pupils) the chance to formulate the research agenda on the topic of EAL. The project was steered by a committee of people who are invested in teaching and learning EAL, and was funded by the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL). For details about the project, visit the EAL PSP website. You can download the report here. An article building on the contents of the report was published in Language Teaching for Young Learners, and can be accessed here.
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From the page to the stage: A feasibility study on using theatre to improve EAL children's communicative skills (2020) [Co-PI]
The goal of this project was to explore the effects of using drama on the linguistic, communication and teamwork skills of children with English as an Additional Language (EAL). It involved a partnership with Collide Theatre and the Oxford Playhouse, and it took the form of workshops for EAL children in an Oxford school. The children read a story, devised under the guidance of a drama facilitator with the intention of presenting the final piece to an audience. The project was funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). You can read more about the project on the TORCH website, and find the report here. A book chapter presenting the project and its findings, and outlining future steps can be accessed here.
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The development of subject pronouns in Greek children learning English at preschool (2015-2016) [MSc Project]
My MSc project explored the acquisition of subject pronouns in Greek children who become bilingual by learning English as a result of attending a monolingual immersion preschool, where English is the language of instruction. As subject pronouns can remain phonologically null in Greek but have to be phonologically realised in English, it was expected that the children would experience crosslinguistic influence from Greek (their dominant language), thus omitting subject pronouns from their utterances in English. The experiment (which used a novel task) confirmed this prediction. The project was supported through a Graduate Expenses Grant from St Catherine's College, University of Oxford. You can find a summary for the EAL Journal here. An article based on the project's findings was published in Second Language Research and can be accessed here.
Archived
Transfer effects in adult bilinguals’ processing and comprehension of multi-morphemic words (2020-2022) [Co-I]
The aim of this project is: (a) to investigate German-Greek bilinguals' knowledge of affixation; (b) to determine whether this knowledge is underpinned by (positive) transfer from Greek to English and; (c) to assess whether this transfer facilitates word comprehension in German. This project involves a collaboration with researchers at the University of Göttingen and is supported through part of an ESRC Grand Union DTP Research and Training Support Grant. You can find the project's preregistration in the Open Science Framework website.
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Lex-15: An oral adaptation of the Lex-30 expressive vocabulary test for young language learners (2023-present) [Co-PI]
This project, pursued in collaboration with Dr Sophie Liggins (University of Essex) and with the support of Prof Paul Meara (University of Oxford) involves the development and evaluation of a new expressive vocabulary test for young language learners, based on Meara and Fitzpatrick's Lex-30: the Lex-15. Practitioners and researchers who work with young multilingual leaners (the number of whom is increasing around the world) need an effective and efficient tool to assess their learners' expressive vocabulary. The Lex-15 aims to fill this need, as it is an oral test that is quick to administer and easy to score. Before opening the test for practitioners/reserachers to use, substantial work needs to be conducted to ascertain whether it is valid and reliable. The work started as part of a different project, funded by the John Fell Fund (Oxford University Press), but continues to run independently.