Please join the LAAL (Languages & Applied Linguistics) Department for a presentation titled, “Bridging Divides in Oral and Written Language Research: Development and Disorders in Bilingual Learners” by Jiali Wang (Texas A&M University) on Thursday, May 14, at 2:00, in Hum 1, 202.

Although oral and written language tap into many overlapping underlying skills, the investigation of oral and written language has been situated in divided fields, despite the numerous intersections where one may inform the other. From an interdisciplinary research background of Educational Psychology, Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Teaching and Learning, Wang will share two papers in oral and written language research. First, she presents a clinical tutorial on how to use the Bilingual Multidimensional Ability Scale (B-MAS) to improve the identification of developmental language disorder among bilingual children. Second, she presents a paper that examines the language use in the writing of bilingual adolescents. Together, these studies illustrate how an integrated perspective towards oral and written language research can better support the language and literacy development of bilingual learners, including those with developmental language disorder. Wang concludes by outlining future research directions aimed at understanding bilingual children’s language and literacy development, improving language assessment, and translating findings into actionable tools for instructional and clinical practice.

Jiali Wang, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on bilingual language and literacy development, with particular emphasis on the assessment and identification of developmental language disorder among Spanish–English bilingual children. She also conducts research on writing development and assessment, using NLP-derived measures to examine language use in students’ writing. Her work explores how linguistic and environmental factors shape language and literacy outcomes of diverse bilingual populations. Her recent projects include creating clinician-friendly tools for identifying language disorder among bilingual learners, examining the writing development and assessment of diverse learners, and investigating the home literacy environment among multilingual families.