Dr Jessie Ricketts, the Director of the LARA lab, recently spoke to Jon Severs at the Times Educational Supplement about her work.
You can listen to the podcast here
In their conversation, Jessie and Jon talked widely about supporting vocabulary and reading at primary and secondary school. They also talked about reciprocity in the relationship between vocabulary in reading: vocabulary knowledge is important for reading success, but conversely, reading provides important opportunities for learning new words.
A key focus of the discussion was the importance of supporting reading in secondary schools.
Jessie talked about how 20% of pupils in secondary school do not have basic reading skills and that this will limit their ability to access the curriculum. This is a particular challenge for secondary teachers and other secondary staff who feel they do not have the knowledge or the materials that they need to effectively support poor readers. There is an assumption that teaching reading is the job of primary schools and primary teachers. This seems to have two unfortunate consequences. Primary teachers are blamed for not teaching every child to read and secondary school teachers are not given the training and materials that they need to support poor readers. Jessie argues that expecting all pupils to be able to read adequately to access the secondary curriculum at age 11 is unreasonable. She also calls for more training and materials for secondary teachers, as well as more research to understand adolescent reading development.
This podcast follows her recent interview ‘Tes talks to… Jessie Ricketts’, which can be read here.