Guldana Aktaevna Sarbassova - PhD

A short bio

My name is Guldana Aktaevna Sarbassova. I have a qualification of English and Turkish Language Teaching within my Bachelor’s degree from Ahmet Yesevi University. I am also specialized in English Language Teaching from Middle East Technical University and I hold an MA in Linguistics and Communication from the University of Amsterdam. Within my postgraduate study in Cultural Linguistics from the Institute of Linguistics named after A. Baitūrsynūly under the Kazakh Academy of Sciences, I hold a Candidates Degree in Philological Sciences. My PhD project is entitled Breaking the silence. The impact of selective mutism on linguistic development of bilingual children: long-term effects and implications for treatment.

The summary of my PhD project

My project will investigate how selective mutism (SM) impacts linguistic development (productive vocabulary, morphosyntax) of bilingual children by using a linguistic proficiency test battery for Dutch and the heritage language(s). The study also investigates whether a parental switch to the community language facilitates the treatment process and whether this switch influences the linguistic development of a child’s heritage language. The project will provide important insights into long-term effects on linguistic development of children treated for SM and will deepen our understanding of which aspects of linguistic knowledge are most affected by the mute period and need special attention at school and during treatment.

Qian Lei visiting scholar

A Brief Biography of Qian Lei

Qian Lei is a visiting scholar from Xi’an international Studies University of China. She is a professor and doctoral supervisor of Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics. Her research field includes Systemic Functional Linguistics, multimodal stylistics, multimodal narratology and foreign language teaching. In recent years, she is devoted herself to the research on the integration of multimodal stylistics and multimodal narrative studies. She is the principal of a project “A Study on the Construction and Application of a Comprehensive Theoretical Model for Multimodal Stylistic Analysis” funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (19BYY198). E-mail address: leiqian@xisu.edu.cn.