As we celebrate world book day, we thought we would tell you about the LARA lab contributions to Royal Holloway Science Festival 2019
The LARA lab will have a stall at the Science Festival, where members of the lab will be happy to share past and current research into reading, in addition to giving attendees the chance to take part in some of our research themselves.
Mol and Bus (2011) found that regular print exposure (e.g., reading for leisure) is strongly linked to a number of positive outcomes such as oral language skills, vocabulary, reading ability and even academic achievement, from the age of 2 into adulthood. We have summarised this study in a poster that you can see here.
We have been inspired by these findings, and we will be giving attendees at the science festival the opportunity to fill out our own short questionnaire regarding their reading habits. This will help build up a stronger picture of home literacy environments, how regularly children read, and which formats they prefer best. This will help us with our research in many areas of the LARA lab, including the Reading and Vocabulary (RAV) project with Aston University where we are going to encourage children and young people to read more, and explore the impact of reading more on reading and vocabulary.
The festival is sure to be a fun and inspiring day, and a fantastic chance for both the LARA lab and the other science departments at the university to showcase research and inspire those of all ages to become interested in what science and research has to offer.
Update… the LARA lab stall at the Royal Holloway Science Festival was a huge success… we had children queuing to take part all day (and it wasn’t just for the sweets!) and a lot of interest from parents and the community. Enormous thanks to Lucy and Daisy for making this a success.
