Rate My Professor Sonia Cabell

Sonia Q. Cabell is the R. Keith and Patricia Duggins Sigmon Endowed Professor in Reading Education/Language Arts in the School of Teacher Education at Florida State University’s Anne Spencer Daves College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences. She serves as Core Faculty and Associate Director at the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR), directing the Cabell Lab. Cabell’s research focuses on the prevention of reading difficulties among young children at risk, particularly those living in poverty, through high-quality language and literacy interactions from birth to age 8. Her work addresses disparities in language environments at home and school, emphasizing innovative interventions in pre-kindergarten through second grade to strengthen precursors for reading comprehension and word recognition. Motivated by early career challenges as a second-grade teacher in Oklahoma encountering a student’s persistent reading difficulties around 2001, she earned a master’s degree in reading education in 2003 and a doctorate in 2009 before joining FSU in 2017 as an assistant professor.

Cabell leads multiple efficacy trials, including the Teaching Together program enhancing oral language via school-home activities, Scholastic Knowledge Library for content-rich literacy in second grade, VOICES II investigating preschool language environments and teacher interactions, CKLA Read Aloud Project boosting vocabulary and comprehension in K-2, Sit Together and Read and Write (STAR-W) for early writing skills, and Great Minds’ Wit & Wisdom curriculum implementation in kindergarten. She co-authored the book Strive-For-Five Conversations: A Framework That Gets Kids Talking to Accelerate Their Language Comprehension and Literacy and developed resources such as Emergent Literacy Lessons for Success and Teaching Together. Key publications encompass “How the science of reading informs 21st-century education” (Petscher et al., 2020), “Teacher–child conversations in preschool classrooms: Contributions to children’s vocabulary development” (Cabell et al., 2015), “The role of frequent, interactive prekindergarten shared reading in the longitudinal development of language and literacy skills” (Zucker et al., 2013), and others, amassing over 6,000 citations on Google Scholar. Her influence includes a TEDxFSU talk “Writing Into Literacy: Why Early Writing Matters” (2019), International Literacy Association presentations, and podcasts shaping national early literacy practices.