Alison Bailey

abailey@gseis.ucla.edu
310.825.1731

Associate Professor of Education
The Sudikoff Family Institute Fellow for 2005 - 06

Associate Professor of Education Alison Bailey’s work focuses on children’s language and literacy development, known formally as developmental psycholinguistics.  Her outstanding body of work includes studying how parents influence children’s verbal communication skills, developing a tool for teachers to help students at risk for reading difficulties, and working to improve tests and assessments for students learning English as a second language.  

Professor Bailey’s work began with an exploration of how children learn language at home through their relationship with parents and other family members, and later came to include the more formal setting of school.  With her work growing out of a close examination of how social environment and social understanding determine children’s language development, Professor Bailey also studies early literacy development and its relationship to oral language skills; how children who learn English as a second language perform academically; and how academic English - the language of the classroom - is evaluated and taught. 

Because language development is an on-going process that unfolds throughout the school years, factors such as the opportunity for children to learn and use language in different settings and in socially meaningful ways can contribute greatly to learning outcomes.   Professor Bailey’s work explores the numerous challenges of circumstance that can make learning to read and write a struggle for many children, for native English speakers as well as those for whom English is a second language.  Her research has contributed to improving the quality of assessments and curricular development; in particular, she has documented the speech patterns and characteristics of “teacher talk” and textbook language at the upper elementary grades. 

A key facet of Professor Bailey’s research explores how parents, who are in a unique position to engage their children in conversation, may facilitate the development of children’s narrative skills, or the ability to communicate verbally.  Her research has found that the ways that parents converse with their children - such as discussing what happened during the day or providing encouragement to talk about various experiences - appears to influence young children’s narrative development.  Within the realm of technology, Professor Bailey has studied how parents may contribute to children’s narrative development through joint interaction with computers, helping children connect the oral language stories they tell with words and images that parents produce on screen. Professor Bailey was involved in a cooperative study between UCLA, USC, and UC Berkeley known as the Technology Based Assessment of Language and Literacy (T-BALL) project; the study aimed to advance the design of various technological interfaces used in the assessment of children’s academic skills.

Professor Bailey is recognized for her contributions towards developing the Literacy Development Checklist and Manual (LDC) (2000) , a classroom tool designed to enable teachers to effectively identify and help students at risk for reading difficulties.  The development of the LDC led to a grant from the National Science Foundation to support another project, Building Bridges to Student and Teacher Learning: Early Literacy Assessment and Intervention, which tested the effectiveness of the LDC in terms of student and teacher learning outcomes.  Professor Bailey’s work in this area contributes to a body of literature known as “emergent literacy” - the early, enabling skills that children need for learning how to read and tell stories - and looks to clarify the role that oral language plays as children acquire greater literacy skills.

Professor Bailey has extended her research of language to include English Language learners (EL), students who learn English as a second language.  With 5.1 million English language learners enrolled in public schools throughout the United States (U.S. Department of Education, 2005), educators have worked to implement approaches that help ensure both quality instruction and valid and reliable assessments for all students.  Test validity and the equitable treatment of students has become a critical issue in the wake of the Federal legislation of No Child Left Behind (2001), which mandates standardized testing and assessment of English language learners. Understanding the development of school-age EL students is a complex issue that requires consideration of a number of factors; Professor Bailey’s research on this subject has continued at UCLA’s University Elementary School and at the Center for the Study of Evaluation/National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing.

Professor Bailey is the author of Language Demands of Students Learning English: Putting Academic Language to the Test, (Yale University Press 2006).  She has authored and contributed to numerous articles and papers, including chapters in The Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity through Education (Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers), and Rethinking School Language (Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers).  

In addition to a grant from the National Science Foundation, Professor Bailey has received funding for research from the U.S. Department of Education, the California Department of Education, and UCLA’s Urban Education Studies Center.  She has received numerous awards, including recognition as a runner-up in The Carnegie Corporation fellows program, and was honored as the 1999 recipient of The Haytin Award, for contributions to research in K-12 education.  

Prior to joining UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies faculty in 1997, Professor Bailey was a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University and served as an instructor in both the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University, and in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts. She holds an Ed.D. and an Ed.M. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University.