Biography
Molly Leachman is a Ph.D. student in the School of Education, specializing in Human Development in Context (HDiC). Her research interests are often focused on bilingual cognitive and linguistic development, especially during the years of early childhood through early adolescence.
Molly has spent most of her professional career in the classroom, primarily teaching preschool-aged children English. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Advertising, she moved to Taiwan where she found herself working in a bilingual preschool. Having only experienced being an adult language learner, she was incredibly inspired by her students' innate ability to pick up multiple languages at once– learning two of the most difficult languages in the world, Mandarin Chinese and English, side-by-side. After moving back to the U.S., she enrolled at Sam Houston State University to study bilingual education. During this time, she explored topics such as the act of code-switching and the psychological trauma of underrepresentation in American ESL classrooms, as well as countless comparisons of bilingual and monolingual speakers' neurological processes.
Through her research, Molly hopes to spread a deeper understanding of the effects of bilingualism and discover how we can form more advantageous, inclusive educational methodological practices for every student who passes through an ESL classroom at any point in their life.
July 2020
Molly Leachman is a Ph.D. student in the School of Education, specializing in Human Development in Context (HDiC). Her research interests are often focused on bilingual cognitive and linguistic development, especially during the years of early childhood through early adolescence.
Molly has spent most of her professional career in the classroom, primarily teaching preschool-aged children English. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Advertising, she moved to Taiwan where she found herself working in a bilingual preschool. Having only experienced being an adult language learner, she was incredibly inspired by her students' innate ability to pick up multiple languages at once– learning two of the most difficult languages in the world, Mandarin Chinese and English, side-by-side. After moving back to the U.S., she enrolled at Sam Houston State University to study bilingual education. During this time, she explored topics such as the act of code-switching and the psychological trauma of underrepresentation in American ESL classrooms, as well as countless comparisons of bilingual and monolingual speakers' neurological processes.
Through her research, Molly hopes to spread a deeper understanding of the effects of bilingualism and discover how we can form more advantageous, inclusive educational methodological practices for every student who passes through an ESL classroom at any point in their life.
July 2020
