Daniel Schmidtke

Daniel Schmidtke

Research Associate (Academic)

McMaster University

Hi! Welcome to my personal site. I am a Research Associate (Academic) in the Centre for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics (ARiEAL) at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

My research investigates language and reading development of English language learners in higher education. You can find my latest published work below.

Interests

  • Reading development
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Quantitative linguistics
  • Second language reading
  • Reproducible science

Education

  • PhD in Cognitive Science of Language, 2016

    McMaster University, Canada

  • MSc in Developmental Linguistics, 2011

    University of Edinburgh, UK

  • BA in English Language and Linguistics, 2010

    York St. John University, UK

Research statement

My research delves into how linguistic, cognitive, and experiential factors influence reading behavior. I use a variety of experimental methods (e.g., eye-tracking, corpus linguistics) and statistical tools to study how reading skill is shaped by individual cognitive and linguistic abilities. Within this larger framework, my research is dedicated to moving beyond studying the linguistic behaviour of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations. Examples of this research include eye-movement studies of reading in non-college bound adults and corpus studies of linguistic phenomena across varieties of English. My current research uses eye-tracking to understand English reading development of ESL students enrolled in an academic bridging program.

Recent publications

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Daniel Schmidtke, Sadaf Rahmanian, Anna L. Moro (2022). Tracking reading development in an English language university-level bridging program: evidence from eye-movements during passage reading. In Bilingualism: Language & Cognition.

Journal link

Daniel Schmidtke, Sadaf Rahmanian, Anna L. Moro (2022). Morphological knowledge in English learner university students is sensitive to language statistics: A longitudinal study. In Applied Psycholinguistics.

Journal link

Daniel Schmidtke, Anna L. Moro (2021). Determinants of Word-Reading Development in English Learner University Students: A Longitudinal Eye Movement Study. In Reading Research Quarterly.

Journal link

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Current projects

These projects are currently under peer review or have recently been published.

What can the reading habits of EFL students tell us about their reading development? This project tracked the reading activity of 150 bridging program students over 26 weeks in order to gain insight into their reading development.

Many words in English are morphologically complex (assign-ment, teach-er) and so being able to proficiently apply the correct endings (suffixes) to complex words is an important skill to acquire. In this project we analyzed the written production of English language learners and asked What are the statistical properties that make morphologically complex words easier for EFL students to learn? This project was published in Applied Psycholinguistics.

This technical report assessed the change in English language skills of 340 EFL students enrolled in a university bridging program. This report used of the Reliable Change Index Statistic in order to test if the change in scores is greater than might would be expected from random variation alone. The report is available on ResearchGate.

Does your incoming reading skill give you a developmental advantage in an academic English bridging program? This longitudinal eye-movement study of over 400 EFL students showed that if you enter a bridging program with stronger English reading proficiency, you may have a head start in your reading fluency and reading comprehension. However, students of all incoming reading ability levels develop reading fluency and comprehension at the same rate. This project was published in Bilingualism: Language & Cognition.

Using machine learning to investigate factors that predict EFL reading development. This project was published in Reading Research Quarterly.

Teaching

I have taught the following university-level courses at McMaster University:

Statistics for Language Research

(2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022). An introductory course to statistical methods custom-tailored to the needs of language researchers. This course provides an introduction to R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

Computers and Linguistic Analysis

(2018, 2020, 2021).This course studies computational tools and techniques of language processing using large electronic collections of texts. Students are trained in basic text-processing, statistical and programming skills using R.

The Art of Leadership

(2017). This course offers senior undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in a learning-centred leadership program, involving peer-to-peer mentoring of students in the MELD program. The course provides up-front and on-going training and development in active leadership and mentorship.

Undergraduate supervision

I supervised the undergraduate research thesis of Shaina Benjamin.

Skills

R

R, Shiny, ggplot, Markdown

Statistics

LMER, longitudinal analysis, growth curve modeling

Teaching and learning

Evidence-informed pedagogy

Behavioral research

Programming: EyeLink, Psychopy, Java, DMDX; Platforms: Pavlovia, Inquisit, GitLab, Amazon Turk, DMDX

Collaborators

Line thickness corresponds to the number of co-authorships. Collaborators

Media

An article about my current work at the MELD program at McMaster University

A selection of news articles related to our Twitter study:

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