Aris Terzopoulos

Aris Terzopoulos, Birmingham City University

Email: Aris.Terzopoulos@bcu.ac.uk

Aris started his career teaching children in primary education and assessing and supporting children with special educational needs. In order to improve his impact on students, he completed an MA in Literacy Development and Literacy Difficulties at the Institute and Education in London.

He was then granted full PhD studentship for his research project on language cognitive representations of bilingual children and adults at the University of Dundee where he started his career as a Lecturer in Psychology. In 2016 he started working at Coventry University, first as a Lecturer in Early Childhood Development and then as Lecturer in Psychology.

Meanwhile, Aris completed the MSc in Psychology at University of Derby and since March 2021 he works for Birmingham City University. Aris is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, enjoys teaching using new technologies and is inspired by open access research and values of inclusion and equal opportunities.

Aris is currently involved with numerous research projects in the areas of bilingualism, neuroscience, psycholinguistics and language development. In particular:

  • How words are represented in the bilingual mind
  • EEG correlates of the time course of bilingual reading
  • Funded project on the development of bilingual word databases (www.bilexkids.org)
  • Development of a national new spelling test for children
  • Effective interventions with children with language difficulties in partnership with schools

Recent publications

Georgia Niolaki, Kate Carr-Fanning, & Aris Terzopoulos (2023). Psychology and Educational Inclusion:Identifying and supporting learners with SEN, McGraw Hill Open University Press

Niolaki, G., Negoita, A., Vousden, J., Terzopoulos, A.,  and Masterson, J. (2023).  What spelling errors can tell us about the development of processes involved in children’s spelling. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1178427

Niolaki, G., Vousden, J., Taylor L., Terzopoulos, A., Debney, L., Shepherd, D-L. and Masterson, J. (2022).  Spelling predictors in a large cross-sectional study investigating the role of phonological ability and rapid naming. Learning & Instruction https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2022.101635

Spruhan, H., Niolaki, G., Vousden, J., Terzopoulos, A., & Masterson, J. (2022). Spelling performance of 6-and 8-year-old Irish children; Is it< analice> or <analyze>?. The Journal of Educational Research, 115(1), 87-97. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2022.2031844 Marku, B., Niolaki, G., Terzopoulos A.R, Wood, C., (2022).  Eastern European Parents’ Experiences of Parenting a Child with SEN in London. Educational Psychology in Practice (IF: 0.8) https://doi.org/10.1080/02667363.2022.2100320

Role in GRADIENCE: Dr. Terzopoulos and Dr. Niolaki have been integral members of the team that developed HelexKids (Terzopoulos, Duncan, Wilson, Niolaki, Masterson 2016, https://www.helexkids.org), a word frequency database derived from Greek and Cypriot school books spanning the first to the sixth grade of primary education. This database serves as a valuable resource for psycholinguistic experimental studies and educational practitioners seeking educational insights.

Their expertise extends to the Part-of-Speech (PoS) annotation of HelexKids. Additionally, they actively contribute to the creation of methods for assessing lexicostatistic noun frequencies. Furthermore, both researchers play a key role in the production of published papers, ensuring the dissemination of the project’s findings to the academic community.