Sonali Nag

Professor of Psychology and Education | Brasenose College

About me

Dr Sonali Nag is Professor of Psychology and Education and Education Fellow of Brasenose College.

Sonali is also convenor of the Child Development and Learning group and the lead for the Language, Cognition and Development Theme in the Department.

Trained in psychology, and with inter-disciplinary research interests, 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 schools and home settings, child assessment, corpora analysis, secondary data analysis, and narrative reviews. Her work seeks to develop a nuanced and contextually grounded understanding of child development. Her research can broadly be categorised into the study of child level factors and contextual factors.

Sonali studies writing systems, language and literacy development. A primary location for this work is multilingual India, with a focus on Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, and Hindi. With her students, Sonali has also worked in other languages in Asia (e.g., Thai, Sinhala, Filipino, Manchu and Mandarin), Africa (e.g., Swahili) and Europe (e.g., Albanian, English). Taken together, this body of work has helped understand how particularities of a language and design features of a writing system influence learning. Since 2020, she is working with collaborators on interventions that can support children’s oral language development. Another line of recent work is to examine children’s books to better map the real world demands on reading with comprehension among young learners.

Sonali also studies the effects of contextual factors on literacy learning using an unparalleled database of thirty-years of research in low- and middle-income countries. This work synthesises descriptive, correlational and causal evidence to inform theorising, policy and practice. The work on child assessment, for instance, has drawn attention to large-scale replication of western tests even when education systems are not teaching a European language or alphabetic system. The examination of interventions to support literacy learning highlights little attention to potentially useful cultural practices linked to oral and choral language traditions and learning-by-writing.

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 initiated and led international networks for the study of the akshara writing system of Asia, foundation learning in low- and middle-income countries, and supporting language development at school entry. 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. Sonali particularly enjoys working with practitioners and supporting 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 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]
External Doctoral Students

Tonia Naomi William (Experimental Psychology)

 

Research

Books

Book chapters

Conference papers

Journal articles

Reports

Subjects Taught

  • MSc in Applied Linguistics and Second language Acquisition
  • MSc in Education (Child Development and Education)

Doctoral Applications

Sonali welcomes doctoral applications in the fields of psychology, education and the developing child. The following are some areas of research of current students:

 

  • Language and literacy development
  • Story-based interventions
  • Executive functions and learning
  • Stress, motivation and learning
  • Home learning environments
  • Informal learning environments
  • Education in emergency contexts

 

Sonali is particularly interested in students wanting to engage in contextually situated research using experimental and quasi-experimental designs and mixed-methods analytic plans that include advanced quantitative approaches.

Funded Research Projects

ARISE-BBMP Schools Project
Tech Mahindra Foundation with collaborators Ramkumar, S., Miranda, R. Sutar, L., Krishna, M., Aravind, S., Kala, B. & Arulmani, G.
(2014-2015)
Joint funding from Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Karnataka for the Language Development Programme under the District Quality Education Programme with collaborators in National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) and The Promise Foundation
(2003- 2007)
John Fell OUP Research Fund
Education partnerships for development: Sustaining teacher quality in context. £ 59,246
2019-21
Ind-Ox GCRF Grant
Heritage and enquiry-based learning in urban primary schools in India. £ 1250.
2019-2020
Higher Education Innovation Fund through the Oxford Policy Engagement Network (OPEN) Fellowship Scheme, University of Oxford, UK. £ 24,975
2019-2020
ESRC Impact Acceleration Award, UK
Supporting Teachers with Resources and Art (SuTRA). £ 10,371
2019
Royal Society and British Academy
Newton International Fellowship / with collaborators Snowling M.J, Hulme, C., Chiat, S., Quinlan, P., Mircovik, J., McBride, C., Torgerson, C., and Griffiths, Y.
(2009-2016)
Assessment of Foundation Learning and Literacy in Developing Countries: A Rigorous Review.
Department for International Development (DfID). /
(2016-2017)
Indian language early learning and literacy products for release through the creative commons
Ekstep Foundation (earlier Personalised Learning Platform Foundation) /
(2015)
Department for International Development (DFID) to University of Oxford / Snowling, M.J., Chiat, S. & Torgerson, C.
(2013-2014)
ARISE-BBMP Schools Project
Tech Mahindra Foundation with collaborators Ramkumar, S., Miranda, R. Sutar, L., Krishna, M., Aravind, S., Kala, B. & Arulmani, G.
(2014-2015)
Joint funding from Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Karnataka for the Language Development Programme under the District Quality Education Programme with collaborators in National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) and The Promise Foundation
(2003- 2007)