About Dr Connie Mayer
Dr. Mayer is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, cross appointed to the Graduate Program in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. She teaches courses related to language and literacy learning in the graduate program and in the Teacher Preparation Program in the Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (D/HH) students. Prior to coming to York, Dr. Mayer worked for more than twenty years in Ontario as a consultant, administrator and teacher of deaf and hard of hearing students from preschool through to post-secondary. She has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education and is currently a member of the editorial board of the American Annals of the Deaf. In 2007, her article Can the Linguistic Interdependence Theory support a Bilingual-Bicultural Model of Literacy Education for Deaf Students? was selected by Oxford University Press as one of its seminal papers published in the past century. Past projects include a five year investigation of the use of two-way text messaging with D/HH adolescents and a four year study of signed classroom discourse. Current studies focus on the relationships among cognition, auditory skills and early literacy development in D/HH children, and on the written language development of learners with cochlear implants.