Ensuring Full Literacy in a Multicultural and Digital World is a team of Canadian and international scholars and industry, community and outreach partners who are working to bridge the many dimensions of literacy acquisition in our multicultural and digitally-connected world. Our researchers bring expertise in both skills central to literacy development, such as oral language and culture, and in new, cutting-edge methodological approaches, including digital media, neuroimaging, and computational analysis. Our partners include local non-profit community organizations, global companies, and nation-wide outreach organizations.
The goal of this project is to generate the scientific knowledge necessary to ensure full literacy – the deep text comprehension needed to succeed in our rapidly-evolving knowledge economy – in increasingly diverse workspaces and communities. We aspire to translate this knowledge into practices, products, and services for all Canadians.
We bring together experts in six relevant and overlapping areas that form the project’s core themes: Oral Language; Literacy; Technology & New Media; Language Background & Culture; Computational Modelling; and Neuroimaging. We approach questions of interest using a truly integrative approach in which studies are designed, and data are analyzed, by teams that bring together expertise across our six project themes.
Our partnership spans nine Universities and Colleges across five Canadian provinces, and extends to an additional three international Universities in the UK and US. Our partners co-create our research agenda by each working closely with researchers to generate informed hypotheses and design targeted studies that evaluate how characteristics of the reader and the medium interact to shape literacy outcomes.
