2022 Agenda & Speaker Bios

Professor, School of Education, University of California, Irvine (UCI)

Dr. Washington directs the UCI Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub and is Director of the Dialect, Poverty and Academic Success Lab at UCI. Currently, Dr. Washington’s research is focused on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty. In particular, the focus of her work is understanding the role of cultural dialect in assessment of language competence and on identification of reading disabilities in school-aged African American children and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension on development of reading and early language skills for children growing up in poverty. She is a member of AIM’s Research Advisory Board and delivered the Norman Geschwind Memorial Lecture at the 2021 Annual Reading, Literacy, and Literature Conference in October.

What do theory and research say about how children learn to read words, and how can we apply this to evaluate instructional practices?

The hallmark of skilled reading is being able to read words from memory automatically by sight. All words when practiced become sight words. In this presentation, I will explain theory and findings about how this happens and the skills and experiences that are required, including phonemic segmentation, knowledge of grapheme-phoneme relations, decoding, spelling, and reading words in meaningful contexts. Then, I will apply theory and findings to evaluate the effectiveness of selected instructional practices.

The Literacy Bell: Chaos or Community

Possession of literacy skills in the Information Age has become a modern Mason-Dixon line and is inextricably linked to securing economic, social, physical, and familial health. Society as a whole, and educators in particular, must come to terms with the impact of previous choices and the challenging opportunities ahead. We must reject the cynically jaded enticements that entreat us to choose chaos over the community by inadequately leveraging the Science of Reading. 

The Science of Reading for English Learners:  What Every Teacher Should Know

This session will describe national initiatives and reports which can support teachers and administrators for designing the most effective literacy practices for English learners.  Participants will learn strategies to support English learners' literacy development and better understand the error patterns which are typical for these students as they achieve biliteracy. 

Exploring the Intersectionality of Race and Dyslexia

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability, yet it remains underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed in populations of Black children. This session applies the analytical framework of intersectionality to the experiences of Black children with dyslexia and the resulting inequity and exclusion from timely diagnosis and intervention. Through an analysis of data woven with personal narratives, this session recommends and calls for meaningful action towards equity.