。Welcome!
Welcome to my website! I am an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Here I will write about my experiences, academic activities, thoughts in daily life, and share clinical and academic resources. English is my second language and I write a lot in Chinese. I hope I'll post blogs in both English and Chinese here.
。About
My name is 林悠然 Lin Youran [lin˦˥ jo͡ʊ˥ ɻan˦˥], and I'd happily go by "Youran" as in "You ran a 100-meter" if that's easier to pronounce! I am from Harbin, China, and spent seven years in Beijing studying Linguistics. I came to Edmonton, Canada in 2018 to study Speech-Language Pathology. Fun fact: Harbin and Edmonton are twin cities!
"When feeling uncertain about the future, take the more challenging roads." (shouting out to Robert Frost "The Road Not Taken" and one of my favorite singers Shin who once said "I'd undertake the more challenging road, silently, letting it purify my rock & roll blood.") This is what has led me to this challenging but beautiful journey. It took me all the way from Chinese Language and Literature to Linguistics, to Phonetics, to Child Phonology Development, to SLP, and to an academic career. It took me from the other side of the earth to Canada. It took me from an undergraduate student to a new assistant professor. Yet the journey still goes on.
I recently completed a combined program of MScSLP and PhD, which means I took both the professional training in SLP and a doctoral research project at the same time. It was an intense program but I really enjoyed it. I'm especially interested in working with clients with speech disorders, including speech sound, voice, resonance, fluency, and motor speech disorders. After finishing my clinical program, I registered as a speech-language pathologist. My research interests include speech and language development in bilingual children and second language learners, the Chinese speech and language in multilingual and multicultural contexts, and and diversity in the field of speech-language pathology.
In the past years (and will in the future years), I worked with my doctoral supervisors, Dr. Karen Pollock and Dr. Fangfang Li, on a project about the speech development in children who are enrolled in the public Mandarin-English bilingual education programs. I hope this will help the children from Chinese families maintain their heritage language, and help the children who are learning Mandarin as a second language to use it to communicate more effectively. During my defence, Dr. Benjamin V. Tucker asked me to pitch my thesis in a couple of sentences. Here is my answer:
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- Learning a minority language in Canada is challenging, especially when that language is quite different from English (e.g., Mandarin has lexical tones which do not exist in English).
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- Two-way bilingual education is effective to help students with diverse backgrounds to learn the language(s) and/or maintain their heritage language(s).
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- But for new learners of a minority language who do not have the relevant home language backgrounds, more support may be needed from the schools and community.
After graduation, I moved on to a postdoctoral position supervised by Dr. Johanne Paradis. We analyzed longitudinal data of Syrian refugee children's speech and language development in relation to factors such as age of arrival, language exposure, mental wellbeing, and cultural identity. We are also looking at bilingual development in children with special education needs. I am very excited to expand my research interests in bilingualism to these vulnerable populations.
In my current position as an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, I'm enthusiastically investigating lifelong speech and language development of bilingual individuals and the workforce diversity in the field of speech-language pathology. Our lab's name is BiRBY (Bilingual Research & Beyond), and we are a diverse, supportive, and inspiring team. Together, we work on two research projects: (1) the L2Lip project, where we look at English second-language (L2) learerns' speech sound production by measuring lip movements and examining the effects of learner factors and explicit instruction; and (2) the CLDSLP project, where we work to improve cultural and linguistic diversity (CLD) in SLP education by critiquing the current status of CLD in SLP workforce and understanding CLD students' experiences and their educators' perspectives.
On the side of my research and teaching, I create popular science videos in Chinese to discuss SLP strategies for Chinese-speaking clientele and support the career development of prospective Chinese SLPs. I also enjoy cooking and singing a lot. I love talking about research with my partner Kris who studies Reinforcement Learning. They are the talented creator of this website and a penguin lover.