Welcome new Specialist: Barbara Culatta, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-CL
Barbara Culatta is a professor emerita of Communication Disorders at Brigham Young University. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Barbara is PI on the Systematic and Engaging Early Literacy project, housed at BYU, which supports a website (education.byu.edu/seel) and iPad app (Hideout). Barbara has written books entitled Systematic and Engaging Early Literacy and Language and Literacy Instruction in the Classroom, numerous book chapters, and journal articles on language and literacy interventions and instruction in preschool through the intermediate grades. She has directed and received federal funding for early literacy and intermediate grade literacy projects. Barbara has conducted federally funded literacy projects in Spanish and English in Head Start and public-school settings and was awarded research and training grants in early language intervention and collaborative-based language and literacy instruction. She has also directed a cooperative preschool program and an after-school literacy program in a low-income community. Her research evaluates the effectiveness of language intervention procedures for improving children’s academic functioning. She relies on play, story enactment, hands-on experiences, and instructional conversations as contexts for enhancing language and literacy skills in young children.