Projects

Current

Oral Language Development through Drama: Practitioner Needs and Perspectives (2024) [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

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. Three manuscripts that stem from the project are currently undergoing peer-review. A report was published on the Oxford Education Deanery website, and a booklet containing 15 activities used in the intervention is accessible at the Department of Education website.

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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 accessed here. Moreover, a number of manuscripts that stem from the project are currently being prepared or are undergoing peer-review.

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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.