Students

Gabrielle Jones

Pre-Doctoral Fellow
University of Illinois

Gabrielle grew up in the Southern part of France for 17 years, finding her
passion in foreign languages. She moved to the United States to attend Wellesley
College where she pursued her Bachelors of Arts in Russian Area Studies and
Education. Upon graduation, she set out to do research in Deaf Education in the
“Former Soviet Union” on a Watson Fellowship grant for a year. She pursued a
Masters in Religion before launching her teaching career, getting her Masters in
Education, at University of Southern California. She taught Elementary school for
a few years in San Diego before teaching ASL/English for several years to middle
school students at Kendall Demonstration Elementary School, in
Washington D.C. While teaching at KDES, she was a part time PhD student at
Gallaudet University in the Bilingual Education and Literacy Practices Program.
Her interest has now reached the non-alphabetic stage leading her to transfer
to the University of Illinois where an emphasis on Asian languages and literacy
development is prominent. Her interests revolve around mixed methods
research in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural literacy development particularly
with Deaf Chinese bilingual readers.

In her spare time, she loves to read biographies, cultural and historical
accounts. Whenever she gets the chance, she reads foreign novels and plays
Scrabble in various languages. She loves to travel and explore the socio-cultural
contexts to better understand human nature and the wonders of our world.
Biking, hiking and skiing are precious pleasurable moments aside from
academics.

The is material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number SBE-0541953. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.