Harvard Language Diversity Project - Personnel

Catherine E. Snow, Ph.D. 

Principal Investigator

Catherine E. Snow, Ph.D., is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Since 1978, her research interests have been focussed on the field of language and literacy development and its educational implications in a variety of populations, including low-income and bilingual children. She is a co-author of Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy (Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill,1991) and Preventing Reading Difficulties (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).
 

Project Staff

Consuelo Aceves

Lilia Bartolomé, Ph.D.

Linda J.Caswell

Mariela M. Páez, Co-Investigator

Mariela Páez is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Since 1997, Ms. Páez has been a Senior Research Assistant on the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study, an interdisciplinary 5 year longitudinal study that investigates immigrant student adaptation among Chinese, Dominican, Haitian, Mexican, and Central American recent arrivals.  Her responsibilities have included recruitment of participants, development of questionnaires and instruments used in data collection, administration of student and parent interviews, classroom observations, and administration of language and achievement assessments. 

From 1996 to the present, Ms. Páez has also been a research assistant on the Head Start Language Diversity Project, a subproject of the New England Quality Research Center for Head Start (NEQRC).  The purpose of this subproject was to investigate the language environment in Head Start classrooms with children from a variety of first language backgrounds.  Her responsibilities included classroom observations, audio and video recording of language use in classrooms, interviewing Head Start parents and staff members, development of instruments to assess the print and language environment of these classrooms, and quantitative and qualitative analyses of data.  Ms. Páez has presented findings from both of these projects at national conferences, and has co-authored an article for publication from the second of these projects.  She is a native speaker of Spanish.
 

Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D., Co-Investigator

Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D., is a Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has been the research coordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development since its inception in 1987. Her research interests include the development of extended discourse and sophisticated vocabulary use in children from low-income families. She is co-editor, with David Dickinson, of Preparing for Literacy at Home and School: The Critical Role of Language Development in the Preschool Years (in preparation). From 1992 until the present she has been a research team member of the Observational Studies of Mother-Child Interaction Project of the New Chance and JOBS Evaluations (subcontracted to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation and Child Trends, Inc.). Dr. Tabors oversees analyses, participates in the development of written products from the analyses, and presents results in both research and policy-oriented forums. She is also the author of One Child, Two Languages: a Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language, which provides information about young children learning a second language.

Anne Wolf