Are you an ambitious early-career researcher looking for your next challenge?

Do you possess a Ph.D. in Bilingual Language Acquisition? Do you have a keen desire to further our understanding of bilingual language experience and its impact on language development? Are you committed to Open Science? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading research intensive Universities?

Project: Quantifying Bilingual Experience – optimising tools for educators, clinicians and researchers

Our project aims to bring a step-change in the measurement of bilingual language experience. It will seek to establish an optimal metric informed by an in-depth review of existing tools and a consensus among researchers, speech & language therapists and educators on what aspects of language experience to index.

We aim to deliver user-friendly, online questionnaires (and their associated back-end calculators) to return measures of current and cumulative language experience in real time. The questionnaires will be available in 13 languages, and vary in length and level of detail: the shortest version will be useful when parental consultation is challenging; the longest version will yield more fine-grained measures to enable in-depth enquiries.

Reliability and cross-language validity of the tools we develop will be assessed using new data from 300 children in 3 different countries, in collaboration with an international team of experts. Based on this assessment, we will provide evidence-based guidance to inform users' choice on the level of questionnaire detail most appropriate to their needs.

Exploiting cutting-edge statistical techniques, we will also develop an objective method to identify early those bilingual children in need of support with their school language, helping practitioners estimate when a child with English as an Additional Language can be expected to have “caught up” with their monolingual peers.

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact: 

Prof. Cécile De Cat, Professor of Linguistics 

Email: C.DeCat@leeds.ac.uk

Location:      Leeds - Main Campus
Faculty/Service:      Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Cultures
School/Institute:      School of Languages, Cultures and Societies
Category:      Research
Grade:      Grade 7
Salary:      £33,199 to £39,609 p.a.
Due to funding restrictions the starting salary will be at the minimum of the grade
Working Time:      100%
Post Type:      Full Time
Contract Type:      Fixed Term (3 Years – 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2022)
Closing Date:      Friday 12 July 2019
Downloads:  Candidate Brief