Victor Kuperman, a professor in McMaster's Linguistics and Languages department and the Canada Research Chair in Psycholinguistics, has been awarded a 2026 Dorothy Killam Fellowship, one of Canada's most prestigious research awards.
The Fellowship, which is supported by the National Killam Program, recognizes exceptional Canadian scholars working in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences, and engineering.
It provides two years' worth of funding for a researcher to pause their employment duties, such as teaching or administration, to pursue "ground-breaking, best-in-class research" that is expected to have a significant national or global impact.
Kuperman's research focuses on literacy, linguistic and psychological responses to war, and cognition and aging. He is the director of the Reading Lab and is a member of the Centre for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics (ARiEAL).
We chatted with him about the Fellowship and his upcoming work.
Congratulations! Can you tell me a little about what you'll be working on for the next two years?
I'll be working on adult literacy, which is something that is lacking in Canada and most other countries even developed countries with good educational systems.
Our idea is to use AI to create tools that could adapt texts to a specific reading proficiency level for the person who's studying the language, who's struggling with reading, or who wants to improve their skills.
Primarily, it will work with learners of English as a second or additional language and with Canada being the immigrant country that it is, there's plenty of need for that.
The way it will work is that someone could paste in a text that they have to read, and the AI would adjust the text not only to their individual reading level but also to their language background to the language that they already speak.
Someone who speaks Portuguese will need a slightly different output than someone who speaks Arabic, for example, because learners of English face different challenges with the language depending on what other language they speak.
The novel part is this very personalized education this customized preparation of reading materials that will adjust to that specific person's proficiency as well as which first language they speak.
How will you go about building this tool?
We'll start with collecting a lot of behavioural data on reading from people with different language backgrounds and from different levels of proficiency. These will be used to train AI models so when a new user comes to use the tool, they complete a short assessment that estimates their proficiency, and the model will adjust the text to that.
We're looking at achieving "desirable difficulty." We don't want to put the text right at the person's current reading level - we want them to learn something, to experience some complexity and some effort, but not too little and not too much. There's good literature out there allowing us to calibrate that.
In terms of language backgrounds to target, we'll pick several that are tied to the languages of immigration the most common languages spoken by immigrants to Canada. We'll definitely work with Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese and, of course, we'll be looking at English and French as target languages, because there's plenty of demand for English speakers who want to learn French and vice versa.
An important part of the Killam Fellowship is developing partnerships, so we're hoping to partner with Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada, known as LINC, and its French equivalent. These are free language classes funded by the Government of Canada for newcomers.
I'm also planning to work directly with countries that speak the languages that newcomers speak so we're hoping to work in Chile and Brazil, among others.
I'll also be reaching out to adult literacy programs here in Hamilton and across Canada, for those who speak English but whose reading isn't as strong as they need it to be.
What impact will this tool have?
From a practical perspective, teachers of English will now manually rewrite news items for different levels of English learning and that requires highly qualified labour that takes a significant amount of time. So we're hoping to streamline that process not just in terms of general language levels but calibrated to the specific student. Ideally, we'll extend it to cover professional texts as well, not just news items or reading for leisure, but this will require more work.
We want the content to be essentially the same, just with the complexity adjusted.
On a broader level, there's a lot of well-founded, well-justified talk about the productivity crisis in Canada and part of the issue is that the workforce that we have available is often not up to speed, even with basic skills like literacy, to participate in the modern digital advanced economy.
And we shouldn't have to be thinking about literacy at this stage, right? The educational systems are in place, but Canada is not up to par with where it should be, even in those foundational skills.
Studies show that moving the needle on this dimension would translate into big benefits for the economy and society not just in terms of economics, but also related to the use of civil services and the health-care system, informal education, cultural engagement and so on.
Literacy is a key in many regards when it comes to a person's interrelation with society.
This has grown out of work I've been doing in literacy and reading research for a while, both in the lab but also analyzing data from Statistics Canada and other countries that show how literacy affects our societies and economies. It's a natural continuation of what I've done in the past.
How did you feel when you found out you'd been awarded the Fellowship?
Flattered and humbled! These two years aren't the time in which the project needs to be finished - now is a time to boost it, develop partnerships, try out approaches and involve more colleagues, both academic and non-academic. This is the time to gather momentum.
To find out more about Victor Kuperman and his research, read his profile on the website for the Centre for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics (ARiEAL).
