Amy Kyratzis

Amy Kyratzis is Professor in the Department of Education, in the research focus areas of Culture and Development and Language and Literacy. Her training is in language development and sociolinguistics. She offers such courses as Infancy and Early Childhood Development, Language Development, Gender Development, Language Socialization, and Bilingual Language Development. She began her research career being interested in aspects of cognitive and language development, such as how children learn to use grammatical forms in specific discourse contexts, and how language and culture shape thought. In the course of examining children’s language uses in naturally occurring peer interactions, she became interested in how children socialize one another and support one another’s learning through language.

Her research and that of her students’ focuses on children's discourse in naturally-occurring contexts such as friendship groups within nursery school classrooms, and peer cooperative learning groups within elementary school classrooms. One current research project examines how preschool- and kindergarten-aged bilingual Spanish-English speaking children of Mexican heritage in California use multimodal resources and code-switching between Spanish and English in peer interactions during classroom activities and free play to negotiate interactional footings and identities, and how their peer interactions and peer culture goals support their story-telling, literacy, and language learning. Another research project examines how Mexican-heritage children in California negotiate language ideologies through their language practices in peer group interactions with one another, contributing to either maintenance or loss of heritage languages in their communities. Through understanding children’s peer interactions and socialization of one another in the classroom and other settings, educators may be in a better position to capitalize on strengths and improve the engagement of girls and boys of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds in classroom interaction and learning.