Xigrid Soto-Boykin

Xigrid Soto-Boykin, PhD
Director of Language Justice and Learning Equity and Research Assistant Professor
Children's Equity Project, Arizona State University

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 Ameri Corps 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 recipient of the 2020-2021 Multicultural Grant from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the 2021-2023 Kauffman Quality Improvement Grant. She also 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, and on developing culturally responsive language and early literacy interventions for Latinx bilingual children.