Dr Sonali Nag

Position

Supernumerary Fellow in Education

Qualifications

MPhil (National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, India), PhD (Portsmouth).

Academic Positions

Supernumerary Fellow in Education, Brasenose College
Oxford Professor of Psychology and Education 

Academic Background and Previous Positions

Sonali investigates child learning within diverse settings. Her research is comparative with a focus on languages, writing systems, cultural settings and levels of socio-economic status. She uses a wide variety of methods including surveys in school and home settings, child assessments, corpora analysis, secondary data analysis, and narrative reviews. Her work seeks to develop a nuanced, contextually grounded understanding of child development.

Sonali is currently the thematic group lead for the Language, Cognition and Development Research Theme and the convenor of the Child Development and Learning Research Group in the Department of Education. She serves as a reviewer for national and international research councils and high impact journals in the fields of child development, experimental and developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, education, and development studies. She has been a key note speaker, invited speaker and symposium chair at leading international conferences concerned with reading, cognition, developmental disorders, and comparative and international education. She has initiated and led international networks for the study of the akshara writing system of Asia, foundation learning in low- and middle-income countries, and methods to assess child language. She has written evidence briefs, drafted education policies, and led reform of curricula for the early childhood and primary school years. She has been an invited panel member in agenda-setting meetings for multilateral agencies. She has also supported practitioner networks.

Featured Publications with Lay Summaries

1. Nag, S., Vagh, S. B., Dulay, K. M., Snowling, M., Donolato, E., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2024). Home learning environments and children’s language and literacy skills: A meta-analytic review of studies conducted in low- and middle-income countries. Psychological Bulletin, 150(2), 132–153. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000417 
[Blog posts on this paper: Home is where the learning starts; When countries have high income inequality]

2. Nag, S., John, S. & Agrawal, A. (2024). NSP-SCD: A corpus construction protocol for child-directed print in understudied languages. Behavioural Research Methods. 56, 2751–2764. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02339-x 
[Blog post on this paper: Supporting all children to thrive]

3. Roque-Gutierrez, E, Singh, S., Simmons, H., George, E. E., Sharxhi, E., Arulmani, G., Sen, S. & Nag, S. (2023) Films for teachers: supporting language-and-literacy preschool pedagogy. UKFIET, Oxford: UK
[Blog post on this presentation: Films for teachers; see here for the Films Playlist]

4. Nag, S. (2023). Socioeconomic Status, Sociocultural Factors, and Literacy Development. In L. Verhoeven, S. Nag, C. Perfetti, & K. Pugh (Eds.), Global Variation in Literacy Development (pp. 333–352). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[Listen to Sonali in this interview: A system that is failing a generation of kids; and see her work with policy and practice: Putting children first]

5. Nag., S. (2021). How children learn to use a writing system: Mapping evidence from an Indic orthography to written language in children’s books. Written Language and Literacy, 24(2) 284-302. https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00056.nag 
[Updates on this and similar other research: Looking at children’s books to fill gaps in the science of reading]

6. Nag, S. (Feb, 2007). Early reading in Kannada: The pace of acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic awareness. Journal of Research in Reading, 30(1), 7-22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.2006.00329.x 
[See here for a lay summary]

Research in development with graduate students and alumna include education in emergency contexts, social-emotional learning & school interventions Along with an international network of collaborators, Sonali’s current work is focussing on assessments, precursor skills, reading attainments and dyslexia across writing systems, home learning environments, and supporting oral language development in children.

E-mail

sonali.nag@education.ox.ac.uk

Links

Department website

Early childhood research

Connecting Research and Policy

Evidence Brief on Literacy and Foundation Learning in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Evidence Brief on Early Years and Primary Literacy Assessment

Home Language, School Language and Student Attainments

Classroom Literacy Practices in Low- and Middle Income Countries