Language development seems so natural, so effortless for children. It happens so much so that we often fail to see what an amazing feat they are accomplishing. There’s so much we still don’t know about how children accomplish such a feat, why some children have difficulty acquiring a language and how we can best help them. These are the reasons why I’m so passionate not just about teaching, but speech pathology specifically. My research focuses on finding out whether bilingual children may reveal developmental patterns that are similar to or different from monolingual children, and using this data to identify the sources of the differences.
Most of my students will leave my classroom and enter the field of speech language pathology, a field that emphasizes evidence-based practices. I don’t want my students to just learn about language development in my class, but learn to be critical thinkers and be able to evaluate current research on language development.