The UP College of Education participates in the TalkTogether Virtual Round Table Discussion on Child-Directed Language Corpora entitled “Child-Directed Print Corpora: Understanding the Resource.”

Held last June 30 to July 2, 2021, the three-day virtual round table was chaired by esteemed scholars on language and literacy. The objective of the virtual round table was to understand the promise of child-directed print corpora for experimental studies and child language assessment as well as its implications for researchers, practitioners, and curriculum developers.  The first round table was on “Child Language Print Corpora and Child Language Assessment,” which was chaired by TalkTogether’s Principal Investigator, Sonali Nag  of the University of Oxford. The second, on the topic “Child Language Print Corpora and Experimental Research,” was chaired by Jelena Mirkovic of the York St. John University.  The third day on “Children Language Print Corpora and Children’s Materials”  was chaired by UP College of Education Professor and TalkTogether Co-Investigator, Dina Ocampo.  

TalkTogether is a multi-country project made possible by an award from the UK Research & Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI-GCRF Collective Fund). The wider aim of the project is to develop contextualized early years interventions to support oral language development, and thereby boost children’s literacy learning trajectories.

The Philippine team of TalkTogether is composed of faculty and researchers from the UP College of Education Reading, Early Grades, Art, and Language Education (REGALE) cluster, UP College of Social Sciences and Philosophy Department of Linguistics, UP College of Arts and Letters Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, UP College of Allied Medical Professions, and UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies-Education Research Program. They co-authored and presented papers on child-directed corpora as bases for analyzing cross-linguistic lexical properties, morphological analysis, age-of-acquisition ratings, as well as book levelling and text complexity in Filipino and Kannada. Paper authors were Portia Padilla, Leonor Diaz, Marie Yvette Concepcion-Alcazar, Maria Hazelle Preclaro-Ongtengco, Marie Grace Reoperez, Crizel Sicat-De Laza, Eva Haydee Alipustain, Margaret Mary Rosary Carmel Fua, Mary Ann Bacolod, Jem Javier, April Perez, Francisco Rosario Jr, Jocelyn Marzan, Junette Fatima Gonzales, Kathrina Lorraine Lucasan, and Dina Ocampo.

Researchers from the University of Oxford, The Promise Foundation, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University Sains Malaysia, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics – Netherlands, University of Toronto-Ontario, Macquarie University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of Manchester also presented their research and facilitated discussions that followed each paper presentation.

The TalkTogether team released a public video playlist of the round table discussions through the official website of the project https://talktogether.web.ox.ac.uk.