I am a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam Center of Language and Communication (ACLC), part of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. Below, you'll find a short CV and a description of my PhD thesis.

Education

University of Amsterdam, 2013 - 2017
Bachelor Dutch language and culture, with a major in Dutch linguistics. 
 
University of Amsterdam, 2017 - 2019
Master Dutch as a second language and multilingualism.
 

Employment

University of Amsterdam – Student assistant, 2015-2017

I taught the course Sentence parsing in the bachelor programmes Linguistics and Dutch language and culture.
 

Instituut voor Nederlands Taalonderwijs en Taaladvies - 2018 

I taught B1-B2 and >A1-A1 courses and I assisted inupdating the teaching method Codeplus.
 

Municipality of Amsterdam - 2018

I participated in the project Equal Opportunities in Primary Education.
 

Stichting voor Interculturele Participatie en Integratie - 2018 – 2019

I taught integration courses and courses for illiterate adults.
 

Instituut voor Taalonderzoek en Taalonderwijs Amsterdam (ITTA UvA) –  Consultant, 2019 - 2023

Specializations: low literacy and digital skills in adults, and language and parental involvement. I had several functions as a consultant:

• Project manager of several research project and experiments commissioned by the Dutch governmental program Tel mee met Taal
• Trainer courses Teacher Basic Skills (Dutch as a first language and digital skills)
• Developer of teaching methods (for example TaalKlik, which combines language teaching and improving digital skills for adult learners)

Literacy and Second Language Acquisition in LESLLA-learners

The leading question of my PhD project is how language learning abilities of LESLLA (Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults) learners are shaped by acquiring literacy skills. LESLLA learners are adult emergent readers with limited (primary) schooling experience. It is hypothesized that when acquiring literacy skills at an adult age, metalinguistic awareness (MLA) will also develop. These metalinguistic abilities are potentially beneficial for language learning. For example, Bigelow et al (2006) showed that LESLLA learners with higher literacy levels are better in uptaking information from an orally given recast (Bigelow et al, 2006). Also Roehr-Brackin & Tellier (2019) found several correlations between MLA measures and L2 proficiency in secondary school students. This thesis will contribute to our knowledge of SLA by providing deeper insights in the connection between literacy, MLA and language learning abilities. 

This thesis is part of the Meta-LLL project and is supervised by prof. dr. Sible Andringa (PI), dr. Josje Verhagen, dr. Michal Korenar and dr. Sybren Spit. Also part of this project is the PhD project of my colleague Sarah der Nederlanden MSc, who will study partly the same research questions in children who need to learn a second language and how to read and write simultaneously.