Document Actions

Heather McDowell

BA (Nottingham), MA (London), PhD (London)

Biography

Dr. McDowell read English Studies at Nottingham prior to spending several years teaching English to foreign students in a variety of settings.  She came to Birkbeck in 2005 where she completed an MA in Applied Linguistics (Distinction), and helped to organise the 1st Bloomsbury Student Conference in Applied Linguistics.  Staying on at Birkbeck, she was awarded a PhD in 2011 for her thesis entitled “The relationship between phonological awareness and alphabetic literacy, with reference to L1 Chinese users of L2 English”.  She collaborates with Professor Marjorie Lorch on research in reading and phonemic awareness in a crosslinguistic context.

Publications

  • McDowell, H., & Lorch, M. (2008). Phonemic awareness in Chinese L1 readers of English: not simply an effect of orthography. TESOL Quarterly, 42(3), 495-513.

Refereed papers presented at conferences

  • McDowell, H., & Lorch, M. Underspecified and multiply-influenced phonemic awareness in teenagers from Mainland China, Hong Kong and England. Annual Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. July 2010, Berlin.
  • McDowell, H., & Lorch, M. Phonemic awareness in Chinese L1 readers of English. 3rd Phonological Awareness Workshop. September 2007, Sheffield.
  • McDowell, H., & Lorch, M. Phonemic awareness in Chinese users of English: Simply an effect of L1 orthography? 1st Bloomsbury Student Conference in Applied Linguistics. April 2007, London.