January 2026 Spotlight – Jackie Eunjung Relyea
Jackie Eunjung Relyea, Ph.D.
Can you write a couple sentences on some aspect of your career development?
My career journey began with a curiosity about how children who grow up learning and reading across languages and modalities make sense of print. Early teaching experiences in South Korea first sparked these questions; watching young students navigate literacy in multiple languages revealed complexities that monolingual frameworks could not capture. During my doctoral studies, I became fascinated by cross-linguistic processes and how knowledge in one language shapes reading development in another. My early work, including a Child Development study examining emergent bilingual students’ English reading trajectories in relation to their early first-language reading ability, helped me understand literacy not as a monolingual skill set but as a dynamic system influenced by language, context, and opportunity to learn.
Over time, this curiosity evolved toward questions of equity: how instructional design and policy can expand the literacy opportunities multilingual learners experience in classrooms. I have been fortunate to work with phenomenal scholars like Jill Fitzgerald (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), James Kim (Harvard University), and Jie Zhang (University of Houston), who model rigorous, principled research anchored in classroom realities and approach literacy intervention research as a bridge between cognitive science and educational practice.
For those starting out in this area, my advice is twofold: stay grounded in the everyday contexts of classrooms and families where multilingual learners are developing as readers and thinkers, and embrace methodological pluralism. The critical insights often come from integrating experimental precision with qualitative depth. Beyond asking whether something works, it is worth exploring how and for whom it works, and allowing the complexity of multilingual development to shape your questions rather than constrain them.
Relyea, J. E., & Amendum, S. (2020). English reading growth in Spanish-speaking bilingual students: Moderating effect of English proficiency on cross-linguistic influence. Child Development, 91(4), 1150-1165. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13288
Please describe a particular recent finding, current study, or recent publication and what makes you excited about it?
My recent work focuses on building and sustaining research-practice partnerships to advance equitable literacy instruction for multilingual learners. Through long-standing collaborations with district and school partners, my team has been developing and testing the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE; PI James Kim), a schema-building, content-rich literacy intervention designed to strengthen students’ knowledge networks, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Grounded in implementation science, this line of research examines not only whether MORE works but how it works across contexts, particularly how teachers integrate knowledge-building and language-rich instruction within everyday Tier 1 classrooms. In a large randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, we found that MORE significantly improved multilingual learners’ domain-specific vocabulary and oral language proficiency, which in turn mediated gains in reading comprehension and argumentative writing.
These findings highlight that when instruction intentionally integrates content knowledge and language development, it promotes deeper comprehension and more equitable access to academic learning. This study was recognized by Edutopia as one of the 10 most significant studies of 2024.
Building on this foundation, our recent study published in Reading Research Quarterly (2025) introduced the concept of structured adaptations, a design framework that bridges fidelity and flexibility in program implementation. Drawing on principles from improvement science and self-determination theory, the study demonstrated that teachers who were supported to make principled, collaborative adaptations, rather than adhere rigidly to scripts, created more engaging and dialogic literacy environments, leading to stronger student outcomes.
Together, these studies build toward an integrated vision of literacy improvement. They treat teachers as co-designers, honors multilingual learners’ linguistic and cultural assets, and positions research not as prescriptive evidence but as a collaborative tool for system-level learning.
Relyea, J. E., Kim, J. S., Rich, P., & Fitzgerald, J. (2024). Effects of Tier 1 content literacy intervention on early-grade English learners’ reading and writing: Exploring the mediating roles of domain-specific vocabulary and English language proficiency. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(7), 1172–1195. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000882
Relyea, J.E., Gilbert, J.B., Burkhauser, M.A., Scherer, E., Mosher, D., Wei, Z., Tvedt, J., & Kim, J.S. (2025). Asset-based implementation of structured adaptations in an online third-grade content literacy intervention. Reading Research Quarterly, 60(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.70048
Your reflections on your interactions with the Asian Caucus would be highly appreciated.
My involvement with the SRCD Asian Caucus was through serving on the Award Nomination Committee. I have appreciated the Asian Caucus as a space that fosters intellectual connection and mutual encouragement among scholars who often work across languages, disciplines, and national contexts. What I value most is the sense of shared purpose, being part of a community where colleagues are committed to advancing rigorous, contextually grounded research on development and education in diverse Asian and Asian American communities. The Caucus has created meaningful opportunities to learn from one another, mentor emerging scholars, and build collaborations that go beyond disciplinary boundaries. I am grateful for the leadership and collective effort that continue to make it a vibrant and generative community.
Any upcoming talks or presentations we should know about?
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