Xigrid Soto-Boykin, Ph.D.

Dr. Xigrid Soto-Boykin’s passion for leveraging the success of bilingual children stems from her personal experiences as a person who learned English at 11 years old, and her professional experiences as a bilingual speech-language pathologist, an AmeriCorps Reading Tutor, and an early childhood researcher. Dr. Soto-Boykin’s work has two main strands. The first strand of her work focuses on identifying and dismantling systematic barriers Latinx bilingual children and their families face when accessing early childhood, and the extent to which socio-political ideologies create systematic barriers that impact bilingual children’s early childhood education. The second strand of her work focuses on creating and evaluating culturally sustaining approaches to providing young bilingual children with high-quality early childhood education. Dr. Soto-Boykin is the founder of Habladll.org, a website containing free resources for parents, therapists, and educators working with bilingual children. Presently, her work is positioned at the intersections of bilingualism, early childhood, disability, and equity. Through her work at the CEP, she is working with a team committed to improving Latinx Dual Language Learners’ access to high-quality bilingual early childhood education through policy and research. Dr. Soto-Boykin earned her doctorate from the University of South Florida, where she developed and evaluated a bilingual early intervention for Latinx preschoolers who were Dual Language Learners. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Juniper Gardens’ Children’s Project at the University of Kansas, where her research focused on providing professional development to monolingual and bilingual educators and speech-language pathologists, on implementing Multi-Tiered Systems of Support for bilingual children in preschool.