There has been little change in the distribution of funding mechanisms over the five fiscal years, with R01s as the largest category, consistently. Included among these were studies of literacy, acoustics, phonetics or phonology, syntactic development, lexical development, comprehension, and language and cognition, as well as two studies on the neurologic aspects of language development. Note that the topics listed above are somewhat arbitrary categorizations of primary focus, as many of the projects analyze more than one aspect of language development. Seven projects dealt with individuals with educational, language, or hearing impairments. To generate additional research activity in the area of language development and disorders, CDBB is organizing a workshop to take place in September 2000, entitled Emergent and Early Literacy.
Additional activities are in the planning phase.
Further, CDBB will conduct a strategic planning activity during FY 2001 to incorporate advice from the scientific community. Applications were received in November of 1999, and were reviewed in April 2000. Awards will be made in FY 2000. As part of this activity, CDBB will hold annual principal investigator meetings, to form a Biliteracy Research Network and to obtain agreement on some common measures and methods across projects, since a major goal of the RFA is to develop convergent empirical evidence on the best approaches to teaching Spanish-speaking children to read English. The workshop will develop a best practices document and research agenda on issues, such as translation of survey instruments, which includes when and how they should be translated, whether there are threshold numbers of research subjects which make it cost-effective to translate instruments, and how to account for subjects when it is not.