The Science of Reading in Urdu-English Contexts

Teaching Reading, Cultivating Biliteracy: Insights from Dual Language Immersion in Two Scripts

Project Objectives: From Outcomes to Mechanics

This one-year initiative, funded by the Spencer Foundation, builds upon our previous longitudinal research investigating bilingual performance in non-Roman script programs, this project shifts focus towards teacher pedagogical knowledge and student biliteracy skills development in an Urdu-English dual language immersion program in North Carolina. We explore how the “Science of Reading”—a framework largely developed in monolingual English contexts—applies to the unique cognitive and sociocultural demands of Urdu, a language with a deep orthography and non-Roman script.

As schools nationwide shift toward Science of Reading-based literacy instruction, our project investigates how educators translate foundational reading principles into the unique pedagogical demands of a bilingual, two-script environment. While dual language immersion (DLI) programs are known to produce superior outcomes, the “on-the-ground” instructional practices driving these results remain under-examined.

Furthermore, most Science of Reading research focuses on English or alphabetically similar languages, leaving a critical gap in our understanding of orthographically distant languages (Share, 2021). Urdu’s script—cursive, right-to-left, and rich in ligatures—poses distinct decoding challenges that traditional, English-centric models are not yet equipped to address. Our project steps into this gap, investigating how foundational skills are mastered in a script where directionality, textual granularity, and phonological ambiguities differ fundamentally from the Roman alphabet.

By documenting these classroom mechanics, we aim to move beyond student performance data to understand the science of instructional delivery in diverse linguistic contexts.

Research Team

The project is led by Principal Investigator Dr. Hina Ashraf (Associate Research Professor), and Co-Principal Investigator, Prof Lourdes Ortega. They will be assisted by Dr. Nishita Grace Isaac, recent graduate from Georgetown Linguistics, and an additional graduate research assistant. The findings will contribute to both the teachers and the teaching of Urdu, and non-Roman languages in the United States.

*IMS remains committed to explore avenues that could facilitate and sponsor professional development for teachers of LCTLs in the United States, and especially Allen Jay ES.