About

For a more formal overview, please consult my CV.

In 2006, I moved to Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) from Tkaronto (Toronto) because I was curious about life in another city and in another language. This curiosity transformed into a linguistic journey towards better understanding how learners perceive and eventually add another language to their communicative repertoire.

While teaching English as a second language, I was also undertaking a French language certificate. I noticed that my two languages seemed to be ‘talking’ to each other. These instances of cross-linguistic chatter began to explain why myself, and my primarily Francophone students, kept making certain “mistakes”. I began to further wonder: could cross-linguistic influence also affect how we perceive sounds in our second language? And if so, what effect might these acoustic misunderstandings have on our ability to recognize words, particularly the tiny fragments of sound found in the morphophonemic units of past tense verbs—and thus, my MA thesis at Concordia University was born.

Now as a PhD candidate in Education at Concordia, I am continuing my research in perception and focusing on the cognitive aspects of dialectal learning, and how listening to multiple voices is a form of inclusive pedagogy that extends to the land where these dialects are based.

Beyond language, I am an aspiring horticulturist who likes to draw, craft, and relax with a nice supernatural horror film or two.