I’m a linguist, an educator, and a productivity nerd. My current work focuses on bilingual literacy and is driven by the urgent need to increase the quality of education in the U.S. for newcomer immigrant students. I’m the project director of a New York State multilingual assessment project, the MLS, and a research associate for Bridges to Academic Success and RISLUS. You can read about those acronyms and my involvement with them on the Professional Experience page. I’ve previously worked in teaching and educational technology, and those experiences are also listed there.
The Research page describes my work on language and literacy development of Students with Interrupted/Inconsistent Education (SIFE), particularly in the area of developing appropriate assessments. I’m also interested in bilingual languages development more generally. My dissertation was an experimental study of Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers’ sentence comprehension skills in Mandarin and English. It adds to the body of literature emphasizing that home language assessment is critical when evaluating young children who may have special needs, and it specifically demonstrates that care must be taken in identifying the home language so that children are not inappropriately tested. (If you’re concerned about my seemingly random use of “Chinese” and “Mandarin” in the same sentence, I’m glad. Read the summary to find out why I did that.) Finally, although I’m not working in phonetics any longer, my fascination with the mechanics of articulation is actually what attracted me to graduate school, and I managed to develop an expertise in sibilants (s-like sounds) and painting tongues in order to document place of articulation.
In addition to teaching and academic presentations, I’ve enjoyed engaging with the community on topics of language justice, bilingualism, and linguistics. This is work I hope to continue! A summary of some of my presentations is on the Public Speaking page.
Email me at jchard[at]gradcenter[dot]cuny[dot]edu
