BABEL LAB
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
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Establishing Equitable Foundations through Parent and Teacher Perspectives
About This Project
This work began during Dr. Arizmendi's appointment as a Provost Early Career Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and the data collected were supported by the University of Texas at Austin Provost Fellows Fund. This work was driven by Dr. Arizmendi's clinical experience serving Spanish-speaking communities across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Dr. Arizmendi continued with the ASHA Advancing Academic-Research Careers (AARC) award, which she was awarded in 2024.
A nationwide sample of teachers and parents participated in this survey. We collected data from 1150 teachers who serve students in K-8 settings and 1150 parents (525 bilingual parents, 525 Spanish-monolingual parents). Currently, data is being processed and compiled for dissemination.
Below, you will find some of Dr. Arizmendi's slides on the motivation for this work from her presentation at the National Association for Bilingual Education in 2024.
Meet Dr. Rojas
Dr. Raul Rojas is Dr. Arizmendi's collaborator on this project. Dr. Rojas is a Professor and the Department Chair of the Speech-Language-Hearing Department at The University of Kansas.
Dr. Rojas is a certified Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) who provided bilingual clinical services and helped co-develop SALT (Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts) software.
Equitable Foundations Research
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Equitable Foundations:
Empowering Bilingual Learners through Interdisciplinary Collaboration
A goal of the proposed research is to determine what instructional and assessment practices educators are currently implementing in the classroom for Spanish-English learning children in kindergarten and Grades 1 and 2. Data will be collected on: Prior background knowledge and experiences in training, considerations in lesson plan development, fidelity of academic language of instruction, integration of academic vocabulary into classroom activities and lessons, and what assessment measures are being used to gauge student achievement in the content. This will be accomplished with the administration and development of a questionnaire, teacher interviews, and classroom observations, to be developed as part of the research team in collaboration with Dr. Raúl Rojas, a professor at the University of Kansas.
In an overburdened U.S. educational system, it is necessary to offer evidence-based supports and services to address the needs of the educators. To address educator needs, teacher workshops will be developed to focus on cultural responsivity, language development, and classroom facilitation strategies. This will directly provide insight into the every day needs of teachers and what can be done to support them with instruction in the classroom. Instruction is akin to intervention practices in speech-language pathology. Understanding the principles of word learning (Alt et al., 2019; Meyers-Denman & Plante, 2016; Plante & Gomez, 2018), along with the gaps in accounting for language in instruction and intervention (e.g., Arizmendi et al., 2021) helps facilitate the process of implementation into the classroom.