Research Projects

Current Projects

Principal Investigator: Professor Gita Martohardjono
Project Director: Dr. Jennifer Chard
Funder: New York State Education Department, Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages
Total: $10,866,682 (2014-2028)
MLS Informational Page

The Multilingual Literacy SIFE Screener (MLS) is an online, semi-adaptive suite of assessments designed to provide educators in New York State with information about the home-language literacy and math skills of Students with Interrupted/Inconsistent Formal Education (SIFE). The MLS is part of New York State’s SIFE Identification Process and is featured prominently on NYSED’s Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages SIFE Resources website. It is strongly recommended as part of the intake process for newcomer students in New York state public schools. The MLS provides teachers with an automatically generated summary of students’ home language literacy skills so that teachers can design instruction appropriately. The MLS has three modules: Reading Comprehension, Mathematics, and Vocabulary, and is available in 18 languages (Arabic, Bangla/Bengali, Burmese, Chinese, Dari, English, French, Fula/Fulani, Kreyòl/Haitian Creole, Maay-Maay, Nepali, Pashto, Russian, S’gaw Karen, Somali, Spanish, Ki-Swahili/Swahili, and Urdu).



Principal Investigators: Gita Martohardjono, Jennifer Chard, Lisa Auslander
2022-2023, Multiple Contracts

Description
The project has as its aims the goal of sharing assessment and curricular materials with schools serving large populations of newcomer immigrant students, both with and without interruptions in education. Building on research-based principles of the work on SIFE and newcomers, RISLUS is currently creating a new set of tools that will be available to districts across the US. Demand for these tools is high, and several school sites are partnering with RISLUS this year to pilot the new materials.  

Previous Projects

Principal Investigators: Professors Kate Menken, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno
Key Personnel: Sara Vogel, Christopher Hoadley (New York University)
Funder: National Science Foundation in partnership with New York University.
Total: $535,000 (2017-2021)
Project Website

Description
As part of their efforts to support the research and development needed to bring computer science content to all K-12 learners, the National Science Foundation granted an award to researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center's Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development to establish a partnership with bilingual teachers at three New York City public middle schools in Washington Heights.

The 4-year project seeks to address a problem of practice facing educators tasked with rolling out New York City's Computer Science for All (CS4All) policy: how to equitably serve emergent bilinguals -- students who speak languages other than English and are learning English. Translanguaging is a pedagogical approach that encourages teachers to leverage children’s diverse language practices in classroom instruction. It is thought that the skills emergent bilingual students use to learn multiple languages may also be useful in helping them learn to program computers. This project will explore whether that is the case, and more broadly examine computer science instruction for emergent bilinguals. Accordingly, PiLaCS will develop and test pedagogies that draw on the strengths of students as they learn computer science and become empowered makers and users of technology. The grant began in August 2017 and continues today. 

Project History
PiLaCS began in August 2017 with a grant for ‘Leveraging Multilingualism to Support Computer Science Education through Translanguaging Pedagogies.’ Translanguaging is a pedagogical approach that encourages teachers to leverage children’s diverse language practices in classroom instruction. It is thought that the skills emergent bilingual students use to learn multiple languages may also be useful in helping them learn to program computers. This project explores whether that is the case, and more broadly examines computer science instruction for emergent bilinguals. The second grant awarded by NSF for PiLaCS in 2018 expands the work of the project, by increasing the number of teachers at the schools, developing an approach for professional development, and linking computation literacies to authentic uses of computer science in communities.

Publications
Vogel, S., Ascenzi-Moreno, L., & García, O. (2018). An Expanded View of Translanguaging: Leveraging the Dynamic Interactions Between a Young Multilingual Writer and Machine Translation Software. In J. Choi & S. Ollerhead (Eds.), Plurilingualismin Teaching and Learning: Complexities Across Contexts (pp. 89–106). London, United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Vogel, S., Ascenzi-Moreno, L., Hoadley, C., & Menken, K. (2018). Leveraging multilingualism to support computer science education through translanguaging pedagogies. In Translanguaging: Opportunities and Challenges in a Globalized World. University of Ottawa. Retrieved from: ccerbal2018.sciencesconf.org/

Principal Investigators: Professors Ricardo Otheguy, Ofelia García, and Kate Menken
Funder: New York State Education Department
Total:  $8,988,783 (2011-2019)
Project Website

Description
The CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (NYSIEB) worked to improve the education of emergent bilingual students across New York State. Emergent Bilinguals speak a language other than English (LOTE) as their home language and are learning English in school. This was a collaborative project of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education funded by the New York State Education Department from 2011 to 2019.

Project History
At RISLUS, the CUNY-NYSIEB project was led by Principle Investigators Ricardo Otheguy, Ofelia García, and Kate Menken. The goal of the initiative was to build upon the accumulated experience of New York State educators in the instruction of emergent bilingual students in order to launch an innovative effort to improve the school experience and the academic success of these students. 

The project began to: (a) support schools that serve large numbers of emergent bilinguals (b) document and create a portfolio of successful educational policies, programs, and practices associated with emergent bilingual students in the state, and (c) to explore the development of New York State Home Language Arts (HLA) Standards that are aligned with the Next Generation Learning Standards, HLA being an important component in the education of emergent bilinguals. CUNY-NYSIEB worked with partner schools across New York State from 2011 to 2016. CUNY-NYSIEB finished through the 2019 school year with a focus on supporting and sustaining bilingual programs across New York State.

Publications

Principal Investigator: Professor Tatyana Kleyn
Supporting Immigrants in Schools Video Series
Funded by New York State Education Department
Total: $40,600 (2018)
Project Website

Description:
Created to address the current immigration context, this project seeks to provide the most up to date information, show examples of schools doing right by immigrant students and ensure schools are aware of policies and actions they should take. The project includes four, 10-minute videos and a resource guide for educators, targeted for pre-kindergarten-12 educators in NYC. Topics include fostering a welcoming environment, enrolling and preparing for ICE. Launched on Oct. 15, 2019 at Aaron Davis Hall at CUNY, the project has been made available online.

Principal Investigators: Professors Kate Menken​, Sharon Avni​
Funder: Spencer Foundation
Total: $49,992 (2016-18)

Description
This study focused on three Hebrew dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs in New York City, the first of which opened in 2010; two are elementary charter schools and one is a traditional public middle school. Using complementary qualitative methods, this comparative study investigated how Hebrew DLBE programs teach about and negotiate linguistic, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. Its goal was to provide empirical evidence about the opportunities and challenges of DLBE programs and highlights how these programs inform broader conversations about bilingualism as a goal of and opportunity for public schooling. Dr. Kate Menken and Dr. Sharon Avni considered whether new DLBE programs in city schools today can hold true to the original social justice aims of bilingual education. 

The project entailed 16 months of classroom observations of a Hebrew-English dual language bilingual education program at a public intermediate school located in NY.

Publications

  • Menken, K.& Avni, S. (2017) Challenging linguistic purism in dual language bilingual education: A case study of Hebrew in a New York City public middle school. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 37, 185-202.
  • Avni, S. & Menken, K. (2019). The expansion of dual language bilingual education into new communities and languages: The case of Hebrew in a New York City public middle school. Theory Into Practice, 58(2), 154-163.

Principal Investigator: Professor Kate Menken
Funder: New York City Department of Education
Total: $426,000 (2006-2016)

The purpose of this research project was to explore the characteristics and educational needs of Long-Term English Language Learners (LTELLs), students who remain engaged in the process of learning English after 6 years or more in the United States. While there are significant numbers of LTELLs in the New York City public schools, comprising approximately one-third of all high school English Language Learners (ELLs), very little research has been conducted about these students. Though often orally proficient in English, Long-Term ELLs are characterized by low levels of academic literacy in both English and their home language, and typically score below grade level on assessments. Traditional English as a second language and bilingual education programs at the secondary level were previously designed to meet the needs of newly arrived ELLs who are literate in their home language, but such programs often fail to meet the needs of Long-Term ELLs. In the current project, a descriptive qualitative study was conducted in three New York City high schools serving LTELLs with the aim of gaining a clearer understanding of this population and learning how high schools can best meet the needs of these students. 

The LTELL project has explored the characteristics and educational needs of Long-Term English Language Learners (LTELLs) through two studies in New York City Public schools.

Phase I explored the characteristics and needs of LTELLs with support from NYC DOE based on a quantitative study (January to June 2007). The qualitative study included 29 LTELLs, 5 administrators, and 4 teachers. Phase II (2007-2009) tested out academic programming in English and Spanish to serve the needs of LTELLs for ninth and twelfth graders in the 2008-09 school year. These qualitative and quantitative studies included 42 students overall, with 14 students’ results at a third school used as a control, 11 teachers and 4 administrators. Evaluations included the use of the ALLD as a pre-test for students. RISLUS’s work with LTELLs has continued with professional development programming for educators through Bridges to Academic Success and through the CUNY-NYSIEB project.

Publications

Principal Investigators: Professors Ricardo Otheguy and Ana Celia Zentella
Funder: National Science Foundation
Total: $535,000 (2001-2013)

Description
Spanish speakers in New York City (NYC) are experiencing language and dialect contact on an unusually large scale. With support from the National Science Foundation, this project investigated the consequences of such contact through a sociolinguistic study of the alternation between presence and absence of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) with finite verbs in Spanish. 

The project raised the question whether Spanish dialects are undergoing leveling or hyper-differentiation and/or whether they are converging with English. Leveling may indicate the rise of a NYC Spanish, suggestive of a new NYC Latino identity; hyper-differentiation may suggest the emergence of transnational identities that tie immigrants and language minorities to their distant communities of origin more than to speakers of other dialects in the immigrant setting.

This large sociolinguistic study produced 300 interviews at a first stage. A subset of 140 interviews with Spanish speakers from six different ethno-national groups in New York City was subsequently chosen to form what has come to be known as the Otheguy-Zentella corpus. The corpus is stratified with consideration to gender, national origin, areal origin, age of arrival, years in New York City, social class, years of education, English skills, and amount of Spanish use. 

Some of the interview transcripts have been used for the corpus of Spanish in the United States developed by Professor Francisco Moreno-Fernández of the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain). In addition, interview transcripts can be made available upon request on a limited basis to qualified scholars (contact Professor Daniel Erker of Boston University).

Many publications have used all or part of the corpus as data. They include a book-length variationist treatment (Otheguy & Zentella 2012), as well as several dissertations, chapters, and articles, which used the corpus for studies under diverse theoretical underpinnings and with different purposes. A selection of these works is listed below.

Publications

  • Erker, Daniel & Ricardo Otheguy. 2020. American myths of linguistic assimilation: A sociolinguistic rebuttal. Language in Society 50.197-233. doi:10.1017/S0047404520000019.
  • Erker Daniel, Eduardo Ho-Fernández, Ricardo Otheguy, Naomi Lapidus Shin 2017. Continuity and change in Spanish among Cubans in New York: A study of subject placement with finite verbs. Cuban Spanish dialectology: Variation, contact, and change, ed. by Alejandro Cuza. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
  • Lapidus, Naomi & Ricardo Otheguy. 2005a. Contact Induced Change? The case of nonspecific ellos. Selected Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, ed. by Lotfi Sayahi and Maurice Westmoreland. New York: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
  • Lapidus, Naomi & Ricardo Otheguy. 2005b. Overt nonspecific ellos in the Spanish of New York. Spanish in Context 2.157-176.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo. 2023. Culturally specific messaging and the explanation of contact in impacted bilinguals. Languages 8. 185. doi.org/10.3390/languages8030185
  • Otheguy, Ricardo. 2015. Variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic theory in the context of pronominal perseveration. Linguistic variation: Confronting fact and theory, ed. by Rena Torres Cacoullos, Nathalie Dion & André Lapierre. Routledge Publishers, pp. 319-334.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo. 2014. Remarks on pronominal perseveration and functional explanation. Perspectives in the study of Spanish language variation: Papers in honor of Carmen Silva-Corvalán, ed. by Andrés Enrique-Arias, Manuel J. Gutiérrez, Alazne Landa, and Francisco Ocampo. Anejos de Verba, pp. 373-396. 
  • Otheguy, Ricardo. 2013. Convergencia conceptual y la sobrestimación de la presencia de elementos estructurales ingleses en el español estadounidense. El español en los Estados Unidos: E pluribus unum? Enfoques multidisciplinarios, edición de Domnita Dumitrescu y Gerardo Piña-Rosales. Nueva York: Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE), pp. 129-150.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo, and Ana Celia Zentella. 2012. Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling and structural continuity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo, Ana Celia Zentella & David Livert. 2010. Generational differences in pronominal usage in Spanish reflecting language and dialect contact in a bilingual setting.  Language contact: New perspectives, ed. by Muriel Norde, Bob de Jonge & Cornelius Hasselblatt. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., pp. 45-62.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo & Ana Celia Zentella. 2007. Apuntes preliminares sobre el contacto lingüístico y dialectal en el uso pronominal del español en Nueva York. Spanish in contact: Policy, social and linguistic inquiries, ed. by Kim Potowski & Richard Cameron. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. pp. 275-296.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo & Luis Quesada Nieto. 2023. Sintaxis del español en contacto con otras lenguas. Sintaxis del español /The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Syntax, eds. Guillermo Rojo, Victoria Vázquez Rozas, & Rena Torres Cacoullos. New York: Routledge, pp. 551-563.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo, Ana Celia Zentella & David Livert. 2010. Generational differences in pronominal usage in Spanish reflecting language and dialect contact in a bilingual setting.  Language contact: New perspectives, ed. by Muriel Norde, Bob de Jonge & Cornelius Hasselblatt. Amsterdam & Phildadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., pp. 45-62.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo, Ana Celia Zentella & David Livert. 2008. La evolución de los factores condicionantes de la variación como evidencia de contacto interlingüístico y nivelación dialectal en el español en Nueva York. Actas del XV Congreso de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina. Universidad de la República, Monteviedo, Uruguay, 18 - 21 August 2008.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo & Naomi Lapidus. 2005. Matización de la teoría de la simplificación en las lenguas en contacto: El concepto de la adaptación en el español de Nueva York. Contactos y contextos lingüísticos: El español en Estados Unidos y en contacto con otras lenguas, ed. by Luis A. Ortiz López & Manel Lacorte.  Madrid & Frankfurt:  Editorial Iberoamericana / Vervuert Verlag.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo & Naomi Shin. 2023. La variación en la Escuela de Columbia y en la sociolingüística cuantitativa. Lengua y cultura: Homenaje a Angelita Martínez. Adriana Speranza (Coord.), Gabriela Bravo de Laguna y Ivana Mestiner (Comps.). La Plata: Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, pp. 35-82.
  • Otheguy, Ricardo & Naomi Shin. 2022. La variación en la Escuela de Columbia y en la sociolingüística cuantitativa. Lenguaje y cultura: Homenaje a Angelita Martínez, eds. Adriana Speranza, Gabriela Bravo de Laguna, Ivana Mestriner. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación / Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales. Universidad Nacional de La Plata, pp. 35-82.

Principal Investigators: Gita Martohardjono and Ricardo Otheguy
Key Personnel: Shannon Webb
Funder: CUNY College Now
Total: $10,000 (2010-2011)

Description
At the request of the CUNY College Now program, the team, led by Gita Martohardjono and Ricardo Otheguy, evaluated the effectiveness of College Now college prep workshops through Queens College and Queensborough Community College. The purpose was to learn whether there were measurable outcomes stemming from the specialized College Now experiences of high school English language learners, and specifically, which academic fronts had benefited.

Principal Investigators: Professors Elaine Klein and Gita Martohardjono
Funder: New York City Department of Education, Office of English Language Learners
Total: $450,000 (2004-2008)

Description:
The Students with Interrupted and Inconsistent Formal Education (SIFE) Assessment Project began with the goal to help the New York City Department of Education better understand and serve their growing number of SIFE students. In the first phase (2005-06), researchers developed a base characterization of SIFE students and investigated how to assess them. Phase I found that the class content for SIFE were generally above the levels they could understand. In order to assist SIFE students, researchers concluded that instructors should support home language skills, with an emphasis on foundational literacy and basic reading skills. In Phase II (2006-08), the team evaluated students further and pilot-tested a new RISLUS-developed assessment, the Academic Language and Literacy Diagnostic (ALLD) in Spanish and English.

Researchers recommended that SIFE students be assessed in their home language in order to determine existing literacy abilities which are transferable to the second language, English. Intensive support in both the home language and English is needed in order for SIFE to be able  to access grade level academic content.

Publications

Principal Investigators: Elaine Klein, Gita Martohardjono, Virginia Valian
Funder: National Science Foundation
Total: $198,000 (2002-2007)

Description:
In a collaboration between Hunter College, Queens College, and the Second Language Acquisition Lab at the Graduate Center, this project investigated the comprehension and production of tense and aspect markers in Standard American English by child and adult speakers of Chinese and bidialectal speakers of African American Vernacular English, and in English and Spanish by Spanish/English bilingual children.

Publications

  • Klein, E.C. & Martohardjono, G., 2017. The Development of morphosyntax in child and adult L2 acquisition. In E. Fernandez and H. Cairns, eds. The Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Martohardjono, G., V. Valian and E. Klein, forthcoming. The Tense Puzzle in Second Language Acquisition.  In G. Martohardjono and S. Flynn, eds., Language in Development:  a crosslinguistic perspective.  Cambridge, MA. MIT Press

Principal Investigators: Professors Gita Martohardjono, Elaine Klein and Ricardo Otheguy
Funder: Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Total: $49,979 (2002-2005)

Description:
A large pilot study on the role of Spanish syntactic competence in the acquisition of English literacy by bilingual kindergarteners in three NYC public schools. Following the pilot study, the team, led by Gita Martohardjono and Ricardo Otheguy, utilized the results to conduct teacher training sessions at a Brooklyn public school.

Publications

Principal Investigators: Ricardo Otheguy
Funder: The Aaron Fishman Foundation
Total: $2,400 (2003-2004)

Description:
A study led by Dr. Richardo Otheguy and Joshua Fishman to survey the use of Yiddish in Jewish day schools in the United States and Canada. The project investigated the extent to which the Yiddish language is used in Jewish Day Schools in the United States, and the interest that these schools may have in greater use of the language for instruction and as a subject.

Principal Investigator: Michael Newman
Funder: Sociological Initiatives Foundation
Total: $14,500 (2002)

Description:
Project led by Michael Newman of Queens College for the study of variation and structure in the English phonology of bilingual teenagers in two New York City high schools.

Publications

Scroll to Top