Catherine E. Snow

American psychologist

Catherine Elizabeth Snow (born December 14, 1945) is an educational psychologist and applied linguist. In 2009 Snow was appointed to the Patricia Albjerg Graham Professorship in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, having previously held the Henry Lee Shattuck Professorship also in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Snow is past president of the American Educational Research Association (2000–2001). She chaired the RAND Corporation 'reading study group' from 1999. Snow has contributed to theories of bilingualism and language acquisition through parent–child interaction. With Brian MacWhinney, Snow founded the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database, a corpus of children's speech used by numerous language acquisition researchers. She is also on the advisory board of FFIPP USA (Faculty for Israeli Palestinian Peace USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and for just peace.

Snow was interested in the relationship of individual home conditions and the ability to become proficient in two languages. In order to determine the role of vocabulary in the bilingual population a series of experiments were conducted analyzing the consequences of the socio economic status (SES) of individuals as well as language predictors in both of the languages in question—Spanish and English. The sample was a group of 96 fifth grade Latino English language learners of varying SES. Spanish did become less dominant in the home compared to English because home factors. One home factor that decreased the child's vocabulary in Spanish is that many of the books that are resourced are in English rather than Spanish causing book sharing time at home with the child to be mainly in English than in Spanish. English is introduced to minority children through factors inside and outside of the home, resulting in a child's increase in English vocabulary which demonstrates how English holds a higher status in society. Snow began with the first basic bilingual approach, The Foreign Language which is a simplistic approach because it focuses on the idea that the best way to learn a second language is to be in the native and social environment of that language. This can affect older and younger learners in different ways. She states that under this approach, young learners such as children will learn a second language better in a social environment of that foreign language. For older learners, being taught by a tutor who is proficient in that foreign language will allow older learners to learn and develop their second language better. This approach does not support the idea that there is a certain critical age where someone needs to learn a second or third language. It also does not support the idea that innate cognitive ability has any emphasis on learning a second language. Lastly, the reading skills had to be carefully assessed to track the first and second language development and their relations to each other. Researchers examined the student's phonological segmentation, word reading skills, word recognition, and listening and reading comprehension in both Spanish and English. The research concluded that being orally proficient in a first language will not be enough to develop second language skills. The work suggested that children need to be literate in their first language to build second language skills and having instructions in their first language will only be beneficial to their success. On top of first language instructions, teachers need to incorporate English instructions as well to build on to their student's vocabulary and spelling.

Catherine Snow married Michael Baum from Cedar Falls, Iowa, and they have a son, Nathaniel Baum Snow. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband.