Professor Holly Joseph (Professor of Language Education and Literacy Development, University of Reading’s Institute of Education) is awarded an ADR UK Linked Administrative Data Studentship funding.
This prestigious doctoral studentship, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK), may be taken full-time or part-time, covers your university fees, and provides you with a stipend of £17,688 per year.
The successful candidate will be working on a research project, titled ‘Does being multilingual protect children from the effects of social disadvantage?’, and will have Professor Joseph and Dr. Daisy Powell (Associate Professor in the Psychology of Written Language) as their primary supervisor and second supervisor respectively.
This project aims to better understand how being classified as EAL (i.e. multilingual) might protect against the effects of social disadvantage. Using two large administrative datasets, Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) and Growing Up in England Dataset will be used to ask the following questions:
- To what extent does EAL status act as a protective factor from socioeconomic disadvantage in educational attainment?
- Which (if any) language backgrounds are particularly helpful and does language background interact with ethnicity and other factors (household information)?
- Which measures of early school attainment are most predictive of success at GCSE, A-Level, further and higher education, and career success?
Answering these questions will increase understanding of the protective and risk factors for academic and employment success for those born into socioeconomic disadvantage, be they monolingual or multilingual.
If you are interested in applying for this studentship, you can find the application process details here.
To learn more about Professor Joseph’s research interests, click here. She tweets at @drhollyjoseph.
