PhD in Second Language Acquisition (SLA)
Department of Modern Languages
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
poojar AT andrew DOT cmu DOT edu

My research interests focus on the literacy development of multilingual students in the developing world, whose educational contexts are characterized by high-poverty and “functional” multilingualism. I am particularly interested in two aspects of such bi-/multi-literacy development: 1) identifying the cognitive and linguistic factors that promote literacy in each language, as well as those that are transferable across languages; and 2) examining how the development of the cognitive and linguistic predictors of literacy are dependent on the social environment within which the practice of literacy is embedded.