This month, we are delighted to introduce Dr. Shelley Xiuli Tong (xltong@hku.hk) as our member in the spotlight. Shelley is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong and Director of the Speech, Language, and Reading Lab.
For the past decade, she has addressed educational and clinical issues regarding reading development, such as cognitive diagnostic assessment and preventive and remedial interventions, in children with dyslexia and/or autism, leading to various publications in internationally prestigious journals, including Cognition, Child Development, and Journal of Educational Psychology. She is most known for her four original theories explaining the mechanisms of lexical tone perception (TTRACE), non-native character processing (NCCP), Chinese word reading acquisition (PLSM), and statistical learning of orthographic regularities (SLOR). Her awards include a 2020-2021 RGC Research Fellow, for which she was the only female recipient, and a 2019-2020 Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship. Her work has demonstrated for the first time that statistical learning impairments exhibited by children with dyslexia are related to difficulties in processing low-consistency orthography input (Tong, Zhang, & He, 2020). Additionally, her research is the first to show that non-native Cantonese learners of English can outperform native English listeners when discriminating English lexical stress (Tong, Lee, Lee, & Burnham, 2013) and that lexical tone can serve as an early indicator of word reading and reading comprehension difficulties for bilingual Chinese-English readers (Tong et al., 2015; Deng & Tong, 2019).
Her research has been funded by the U.S. National Academy of Education, UK Economic and Social Research Council/Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) Joint Grant Scheme, and Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC), among others. She serves on the editorial boards for Scientific Studies of Reading, Applied Psycholinguistics, and Reading and Writing, and was the associate editor for Applied Psycholinguistics. She completed her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is currently developing an intelligent dyslexic interface design (I-DID) that capitalizes on the individual strengths of children with dyslexia and reflects her life-long commitment to transform scientific evidence into public policy and practice.
- what drew you to do work on Asians, Asian American children and youth, or another topic that is important to you now?
Nothing seems more natural to me than studying/working with Asian children, in particular, Chinese-English bilingual children. This is driven largely by my curiosity to understand how human beings acquire a culturally inherited skill, especially reading, which enables us to participate more effectively in our modern global society. Chinese-English bilingual children provide a unique opportunity to examine this issue since they are learning two typologically distinct languages and writing systems, with Chinese being non-alphabetic while English, of course, is alphabetic. Working on reading acquisition and difficulties with this unique group of bilingual children has enabled me to better understand the synergistic effect of various factors, including but not limited to suprasegmental speech perception (i.e., lexical tone in Chinese and lexical stress in English), oral language abilities, and cognitive learning/functioning, on the process of becoming a biliterate individual. Additionally, I have learned about the diversity or heterogeneity of a bilingual’s language learning and literacy acquisition, which has motivated me to develop/design more personalized, tailor-made assessment and intervention programs for children who struggle to learn how to read and write in two languages.
Furthermore, my own language learning experience motivated me to work with this group of children, especially those with special educational needs (SEN), including dyslexia and/or autism spectrum disorder, who experience numerous reading challenges. When I entered the Ph.D. program in Developmental Psychology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2005, I spoke and read relatively little English or Cantonese. I quickly learned that my native Mandarin skills were not applicable given the English teaching environment and Cantonese-speaking community. Learning to speak, read and write English fluently was essential for my success in this new environment, but also quite challenging. With persistent effort and a determined spirit, I became a proficient Chinese-English bilingual. This experience shaped my interest to use cutting-edge scientific methods and technology to develop effective interventions for helping children who struggle to become proficient bilingual readers.
- who was an important mentor to you in this work, or an influential particular study in the field or in a related field?
I have been fortunate to work with outstanding reading and speech scientists around the world. My Ph.D. advisor, Professor Catherine (Cammie) McBride, is not only an outstanding cross-cultural developmental psychologist and reading scientist, but an amazing mentor who has been extremely supportive and encouraging at different key stages of my career. Cammie taught me how to take cross-linguistic and developmental factors into account when studying reading acquisition. Working with Cammie, I not only discovered the whole-part-whole developmental stages of the Chinese word reading model (Tong & McBride, 2011), but also the different levels of morphological awareness, i.e., morpheme and submorpheme sensitivity in Chinese word reading (Tong, Tong, & McBride et al., 2017).
My initial postdoctoral work focused on English poor comprehenders, and was conducted under the supervision of Professor Helene Deacon at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Helene is a brilliant reading scientist with a tremendous amount of positive energy and an unflagging independent spirit. Working with Helene, I not only learned about English morphology and reading comprehension difficulties, but also how to effectively manage a large research team and stay focused and forward-moving on multiple research projects simultaneously. It has been a prolific collaborative journey with Helene. Our work has shown for the first time that English morphological awareness, especially derivational morphology, is a key factor that distinguishes late-emerging poor comprehenders from typically developing comprehenders (Tong, Deacon, Kirby, Cain, & Parrila, 2011). Additionally, we demonstrated clear evidence of the distinct and complimentary roles of morphological awareness and syntactic awareness in identifying English poor comprehenders (Tong, Deacon, & Cain, 2014).
Because of my long-term intrinsic interests in Chinese lexical tone perception, I was highly motivated to learn about psycholinguistic speech research, so I conducted my second postdoctoral research work with Professor Denis Burnham in the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. Denis is a distinctly creative speech scientist who is fun to work with. In particular, he allowed me a lot of autonomy to explore my research interest, which enabled me to build my bilingual babies’ perception of Chinese lexical tone and English lexical stress research. Working with Denis, I learned both the critical value of creativity and the humor and fun that can accompany research work. Ultimately, my work with Denis led to my significant discovery of the advantage of lexical tone experience in discriminating English stress patterns (Tong, Lee, Lee, & Burnham, 2013).
Without the continuous support and encouragement of these mentors, I would not have been able to venture as far as I have on this challenging but exciting research journey. I am always extremely grateful to my mentors as they are the ones who helped and encouraged me to first knock on the door of scientific research and enquiry.
- any particular advice or tips to someone starting out in the field who is doing work in your area?
I usually do not like to give advice because I am still learning from an endless process of trial-and-error, with numerous failures and rejections of my work. That said, here are a few ideas I can share with Ph.D. students starting their research on bilingual and biliteracy acquisition. First, you must love and/or be passionate about what you are doing. Research can be a long and lonely journey, and only genuine passion and a strong determination can help you persevere through the ups and downs.
Second, if you have a demanding but supportive supervisor, cherish it. If you don’t have that, you may consider finding a collaborator who can play the “pushing-you-out-of-your-comfort-zone” role so that you can achieve a level of excellence required in this field.
Third, start strong, stay strong, and end strong. This comes from my experience as a runner, which I do every morning, every day. I find it easy to start strong, but it is more difficult to stay strong in the middle of the journey, and even more challenging to end strong. For me, research is like my daily running routine: I don’t compete with others, but I strive to improve my ability a little each day.
Finally, don’t compare yourself with others. Everyone is different. Enjoy your process of growing and learning as the individual researcher you are.
- A short paragraph describing a particular recent finding, current study, or recent publication and what makes you excited about it. Feel free to describe its importance from any one or more of these lenses: a) research contribution; b) our knowledge about Asian or Asian American populations; c) our knowledge about other [understudied?] populations; d) practice or policy relevance.
I am very excited about one of my recent papers published in Child Development.
Tong, X., + Zhang, P., & + He, X. (2020). Statistical learning of orthographic regularities in Chinese children with and without dyslexia. Child Development, 91(6), 1953-1969. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13384
This paper addressed a broad question concerning the role of distributional statistical learning, or learning based on the frequency and variability of input exemplars, in reading difficulties. Specifically, we asked whether and, if so, how Chinese children with developmental dyslexia extract Chinese-specific orthographic statistical properties, such as positional, phonetic, and semantic consistencies, from a nonalphabetic Chinese orthography. The major finding in our paper is that Chinese children with dyslexia demonstrated intact statistical learning of positional regularity, but showed difficulties in phonetic and semantic regularities compared with their typically developing controls.
Unlike previous studies that suggested either “impaired” or “intact” statistical learning in children with dyslexia, our findings indicate that these children exhibited atypical statistical learning strategies, such as the use of low-consistency orthographic input in their orthographic learning.
The most important implication of our findings is that during statistical learning children with dyslexia are more influenced by irrelevant distractors than their typically developing peers. This finding is critical to parents, school teachers, and clinical practitioners by suggesting that consistent orthographic input may be the key to improving those children’s reading difficulties.
- If you have any thoughts about your experiences with the Asian Caucus, that would be great! These can be just for the Caucus leadership to know, and/or a message to the Caucus community.
I attended a few workshops and meetings organized by Asian Caucus when I was a Ph.D. student and postdoctoral fellow. I remember well Professors Li Jin and Wang Qi as they were very warm and nice to me when I introduced myself to them. Overall, I think Asian Caucus is a great platform to unify Asian American researchers as well as other researchers who are interested in studying Asian and Asian-related topics.
- Any upcoming talks or presentations we should know about?
I am going to present my work, titled “Improving Reading Comprehension Difficulties through Oral Language Intervention and Reciprocal Teaching in Chinese-English Bilingual Readers: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” in one of the cross-linguistic symposiums at the 28th Annual Meeting of Society for the Scientific Studies of Reading. I am excited about this presentation since it is probably one of the first, if not the first, randomized controlled trial studies on improving Chinese-English bilingual children’s reading comprehension in either Chinese, English, or both.
- What is your preferred contact email?
xltong@hku.hk
- A weblink you prefer to share?