Invited Speakers
Professor John Everatt
John Everatt is a Professor of Education at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He received a PhD from the University of Nottingham, UK, and has lectured on education and psychology programmes at universities in New Zealand and the UK. His research focuses on literacy acquisition and developmental learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, and includes work looking at how to identify literacy problems across language backgrounds (e.g., European compared to Asian languages, and monolingual versus multilingual contexts). This work particularly considers how the characteristics of different scripts/orthographies might lead to variations in learning and acquisition.
Title: Literacy in Arabic: Research on Predictors of Acquisition, and the Development of Assessment and Screening Tools
Professor Stefanie Pillai
Stefanie Pillai (Phd) is a Professor at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya (UM), and currently the Dean of the Social Advancement and Happiness Research Cluster at UM. Her areas of research include phonetics, varieties of English, language use in multilingual contexts, and English language education. She been working with Melaka Portuguese (MP) community representatives on language documentation and revitalisation efforts. She developed BibePortMal, a mobile dictionary in collaboration with several MP speakers as well as produced a trilingual children’s book based on an MP lullaby, Nina Boboi. She also co-produced animated videos of a Malaysian folktale (Sang Kancil dan Buaya) voiced in several Malaysian indigenous languages. She is currently working on aspects of food culture and identity with colleagues at UM and Mahidol University in Thailand.
Title: The Emergence of a Melaka Portuguese-influenced L1 English
Professor Julien Mayor
Julien Mayor is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Oslo (with previous positions in Switzerland, UK, Spain and Malaysia). His current research focuses on how babies acquire their first words and on how to create early language screening tools that can be administered in a fast, yet reliable, manner to all children.
Title: Multilingual Assessment of Early Language in the Malaysian Context: Taking the Slow Road
Dr Maria Garraffa
Maria Garraffa graduated from the University of Siena with an MA(Hons) with distintion in Linguistics , and a PhD in Cognitive Science with a thesis on acquired language disorders in adults . She gained post-doctoral experience at both University of Newcastle, University of Trento and University of Edinburgh working on mechanism for the acquisition of grammar in different populations including children with developmental language disorder (DLD), children acquiring a second language, heritage speakers and adults with aphasia. She is the research leader of the Language across the Life Span Lab with open collaborations with several universities in Europe and south Asia. Her current research interests include: acquisition and maintenance of minority languages, linguistic profiles of adults with aphasia, reading competences in multilingual speakers across the LifeSpan and the application of the syntactic priming paradigm in children with DLD.
Title: Reading Comprehension Across the Life Span: Profiling Learners and People with Language Disorders
Dr Alison Arrow
Alison Arrow is an Associate Professor in literacy at the School of Teacher Education, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Alison has recently completed a longitudinal intervention project examining the effectiveness of providing teachers with more targeted literacy teaching strategies for improving child literacy outcomes. As a result of that work Alison has been developing a new national reading series for New Zealand, along with colleagues at the Child Wellbeing Research Institute at the University of Canterbury. Her areas of research interests include teacher knowledge and professional development, early literacy development, reading and spelling development, reading comprehension, the use of digital technologies, and literacy difficulties.
Title: Developing a Research-informed National Reading Series in New Zealand
Dr Beth O'Brien
Dr. O’Brien is Principal Research Scientist at the National Institute of Education, NTU, Singapore. She is Head of Early & Middle Childhood Research at the Centre for Research in Child Development. A cognitive psychologist by training, Dr. O’Brien’s research focuses on reading development from a cognitive neuroscience perspective; in particular, how different types of learners (bilingual, learning-disabled, at-risk) interact with different educational environments and experiences. She has conducted research on developmental dyslexia with multicomponential and technology-based interventions, as well as on the typical development of reading, reading fluency and biliteracy.
Title: Reading and Writing Across Scripts – Evidence from Singapore
Dr Hui Min Low
Hui Min Low is a senior lecturer and a speech-language therapist in Special Education Program, School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Her research works cover the topics of inclusive education, Autism, and childhood multilingualism. She is an award-winning researcher and has won a number of teaching excellence and innovation awards. She also publishes extensively in academic journals, including Autism, Research in Autism Spectrum Disorder, International Journal of Inclusive Education, International Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Speech, Language and Hearing Journal.
Title: Parental Language Choices in a Multilingual Society
Mohd Azmarul A Aziz
Mohd Azmarul A Aziz is a Medical Rehabilitation Officer (Speech) and Deputy Head, Clinical Research Centre at Hospital Rehabilitasi Cheras, Kuala Lumpur, under the Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH). He is an experienced Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) with 20 years of experience in both clinical and teaching at universities, hospitals and private practices. His primary clinical and research interest includes assessment and treatment of children and adults with acquired language and swallowing disorders. He is the co-author of Malay Preschool Language Assessment Tool (MPLAT), the first standardized language assessment tool in Malaysia to diagnose preschool children with language disorders. He was recently appointed as an Honorary Academic Industrial Fellow by Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM).
Title: Word Retrieval Deficits in Malay-speaking Adults with Aphasia
Workshop Speakers
Professor Steve Janssen
After obtaining his PhD in Psychology from the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) in December 2007, Steve worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Duke University (USA), where he examined the lifespan distribution of autobiographical memory. He subsequently worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Hokkaido University (Japan) and Flinders University (Australia), examining cultural differences in autobiographical memory and the self-enhancement function of autobiographical memory, respectively.
In May 2015, Steve became Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, where he continued his work on autobiographical memory. In April 2020, he was promoted to full professor and later that year became Head of School. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, and he is currently Associate Editor at Applied Cognitive Psychology and member of the editorial board at Time & Society and Memory & Cognition.
Workshop Title: An Introduction to Registered Reports and Open Science
Dr Hajar Abdul Rahim
Hajar Abdul Rahim, PhD, is Professor of Linguistics at the English Language Studies department, School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia. She supervises postgraduate research in L2 vocabulary, corpus linguistics and Malaysian English and is currently leading a project on the trajectory of Malaysian English and the development of a diachronic corpus of Malaysian English. Her recent publications on English in Malaysia include "Nativised structural patterns of MAKE light verb construction in Malaysian English” (2021) and “Locally developed versus global textbooks: an evaluation of cultural content in textbooks used in English language teaching in Malaysia” (2020).
Workshop Title: Corpus Linguistic: Analysing Semantic Prosody
Associate Professor Dr Zulhamri Abdullah
Associate Professor Dr Zulhamri Abdullah graduated from the University of Cardiff with a PhD in Public Relations Professionalization. He earned a Postgraduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship from the University of Cambridge. He has secured RM1.19 million worth of over 20 research grants/projects with highly talented teams. Currently, he leads Global Capability Framework for a Malaysian Chapter with Professor Anne Gregory, supported by the Global Alliance for Public Relations & Communication Management (GA). His current research interests include: Corporate Communications, Organisational Communication, Corporate Reputation, and Entrepreneurship.
Workshop Title: Effective Grant Writing Workshop
