We have been working with the Department for Education to develop training on reading for all secondary teachers. Click here to find out more about what we have done and to register for a trial of the CPD!

Yesterday, the government announced a very welcome focus on reading and writing, with particular reference to literacy in secondary schools. We have been working with the government over the last year or so to develop training for all secondary teachers so that they can support reading in all students. This training will be launch later […]

We continue to work with academic collaborators, young people, schools, teachers, school leaders and a range of other partners, to conduct research on reading and language development in children, adolescents and adults. It has been a busy term so far for us, just a few highlights below about our work on teenage reading. The website has had […]

Following the lifting of Covid restrictions, members of the LARA Lab and Baby Lab had the chance to (finally!) catch up with each other in real life rather than through a dreaded zoom or teams meeting. Earlier this month, the lab members had a picnic on campus in the sunshine. Achievements were celebrated, great food […]

Last week, lab member Grace won a prize for her poster and presentation on educational apps! The poster was presented at the Doctoral School, to a wide audience of staff and students at Royal Holloway from lots of different departments. Grace spoke about how children are using apps, and yet we have no idea what […]

One of the main focuses of Dr Jessie Ricketts and the LARA lab is orthographic facilitation, which is the idea that seeing the spelling of the word (orthography) helps to facilitate learning of the orthography, phonology and semantics of that word. Recently, Jessie, alongside Danielle Colenbrander, Katharine Pace Miles, published a systematic review of orthographic facilitation […]

Jessie and colleagues recently published a paper that investigated whether newly learnt words were retained over time. The paper also discusses graded measures of vocabulary, which provide insight into the incremental nature of learning! Check out the poster for a quick summary. The paper is open access and can be found here.

The last year has been a very strange and challenging time for all. The pandemic has impacted and will continue to impact everyone in a myriad of ways. The current changes in restrictions have given Dr Jessie Ricketts and the LARA lab time for reflection, and to think about what we have been doing. Much of […]

One of the key focuses of the LARA lab is looking at reading and language development in adolescence. What changes (or not). How much teenagers read (or not). Whether they are motivated (or not). Earlier this year, Jessie and colleagues published a landmark paper on reading skills and vocabulary knowledge in adolescence and how they […]

Today, Oxford University Press and the Centre for Education and Youth published an important new report on vocabulary across transition from primary to secondary school. To mark the report’s publication, Jessie was involved in a webinar launch. The report summarises key findings from their survey of over 3500 teachers, as well as research and commentary […]

It has been a really exciting year this year with Grace Pocock and Jess Dyson starting their PhDs and Nicola Dawson becoming Dr Nicola Dawson and heading off to Oxford for a postdoc with Kate Nation. UGRAs Daisy Miller, Lucy Hemmings, Charlotte Stoate and Paige Mahoney graduated with flying colours and Rachel Nesbit handed in […]

In celebration of World Book Day, Nicky Dawson has put together some thoughts on morphology…  Read the following sentence and try to fill in the gap: ‘This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two……’. Image Source: http://i.imgur.com/4dt56.png 

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 […]

Dr. Jessie Ricketts and Megan Dixon (teacher, PhD student and director of literacy at the Aspirer Educational Trust) co-wrote an article for the Times Educational Supplement, which was published in November 2018. The article was called Going to Bat for the Neglected Art of Comprehension and can be accessed here.

To find out more about what we’ve been up to this year, check out our LARA newsletter December 2018

Recently, Jessie reviewed Alex Quigley’s new book for the Times Educational Supplement. The book synthesises research on vocabulary and reading and integrates it with practical knowledge of schools and teaching. It highlights barriers to supporting these foundational processes in schools as well as frameworks for developing strategies and materials. An important read for researchers and […]

Recently, we launched our new Nuffield-funded Reading and Vocabulary (RAV) project in London with teachers and other representatives from key stakeholder groups. Thanks to all for attending! The RAV project is led by Dr Laura Shapiro (Aston University), Professor Adrian Burgess (Aston University) and Dr Jessie Ricketts (Royal Holloway, University of London), with Sanne van […]

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 […]

On Tuesday the 20th February we had an interesting lab meeting on how to create pirate plots in R, led by our wonderful PhD student Nicky. Pirate plots are a type of plot that show raw data, descriptive statistics, and inferential statistics (RDI) in a very visually appealing format. The meeting was attended by Hannah […]