Student Profiles – Brandon Darr
Brandon Darr
At the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, Brandon was a participant in the 2015 cohort of the Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS) Summer Research Initiative (SRI), a program that simulates graduate school research through an intensive eight-week research experience with multi-level mentoring and collaborating. He worked in UMD’s Language Development and Perception Lab with Rochelle Newman, Chair of Hearing and Speech Sciences and Associate Director of the Language Science Center. Brandon was drawn to a study in Newman’s lab focused on the effects of bilingual parents’ codeswitching (alternating between two languages) with their infants, which have immediate implications for Brandon’s larger research interest: how teachers can provide an inclusive classroom environment that simultaneously supports first language maintenance and English language acquisition. Through the SRI program, he analyzed preliminary data for the study and subsequently developed a follow-up assessment looking at language outcomes in bilingual children after more language exposure. In the future, Brandon hopes to apply what he learned about bilingual children to help teachers become more aware of language development differences in the classroom. In May Brandon moved to Bangkok, Thailand, to teach English to more than 250 fourth and fifth grade students at Mater Dei School, an all-girls Catholic school.