It has been a very exciting start to the year for the LARA lab, with a range of interesting visitors. In January we had a visit from former lab member Rosie McGuire. Rosie has obtained a competitive ESRC 1+3 studentship to complete a Masters and PhD at the University of Bath. She is currently completing the […]

Yesterday was the final LARA lab meeting of this term. We were lucky to have a guest speaker in. Dr Danielle Colenbrander, who is a postdoc at the University of Bristol, gave a talk titled ‘A randomised controlled trial of morphological intervention for children with reading and spelling difficulties’. Danielle described a really exciting project, looking […]

Follow this link to Jessie’s new blog post about spelling and reading on the GL Assessment website: https://www.gl-assessment.co.uk/news-items/2017/the-relationship-between-word-reading-and-word-spelling-in-english/

Recently, Jessie was interviewed by Kate Townshend for the Times Educational Supplement. To read the interview, follow this link: Tes talks to… Jessie Ricketts

Thank you to everyone who attended the 2017 Research and Practice meeting. Click here to see the summary of the day and to find presentations. The next Research and Practice meeting will be in July 2018. Watch this space for the exact date.

On Tuesday 12th September the LARA lab got together for the first meeting of this academic year. We celebrated our very own Alessandra Valentini passing her viva – congratulations Dr. Valentini! We also welcomed a new research assistant, Lianne Farrer, who is an undergraduate placement student from Aston University. Lianne will be working closely with schools and […]

In July, the LARA lab took part in RHUL Psychology Department’s inaugural research and practice meeting, which was attended by teachers, speech and language therapists, mental health practitioners, educational psychologists, policy experts, publishers and more. On the day, we launched the South East Research Network for Schools (SERNS). We had academic presentations in the morning […]

Members of the LARA lab will be attending the parliamentary seminar on measuring literacy in Westminster on Monday the 17th of October 2016. With support from the Economic and Social Research Council, Jessie has organised the event in collaboration with Sarah Bunn and others at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Professor Kathy Rastle will […]

In 1998, Uta Frith argued that reading was a virus, infecting speech processing. In her guest blog on the Teacher Development Trust website, Jessie describes the importance of reading for growth in vocabulary knowledge. Read the blog by following this link!  

On 8th June, LARA lab and the Language, Learning and Cognition lab joined forces to host a day of talks on the topic of morphology in reading. Professor Julia Carroll and Dr Helen Breadmore visited from Coventry University and both gave fantastic talks presenting data from the Coventry and Warwick Morphology and Phonology Project. Professor […]

So… after approximately 1200 hours of data collection over the last 2.5 years, the data for all three phases of our longitudinal study on Vocabulary and Reading in Secondary School are in! We have been following pupils from Year 7 (11-12 years) to Year 9 (13-14 years) in three secondary schools. We are presenting preliminary […]

Enormous congratulations to our UG LARA lab members who are graduating today. I wish I could be there in person! Rosie McGuire, Grace Pocock, Eva Dvorakova, Emily Crosby, Sophie Groosman. Thanks for all of your help with the VaRiSS project and all the very best for your future plans.

At the LARA lab meeting at the end of May, we celebrated the end of final year exams for undergraduate research assistants Grace Pocock, Rosie McGuire, Emily Crosby and Sophie Groosman. Grace and Rosie are helping with data collection for the VaRiSS project, whilst Emily and Sophie are just starting to collect data looking at […]

During May, most of the LARA lab attended the FRiLL annual conference at Easthampstead Park, Bracknell, where the sunny weather provided a perfect backdrop for a fantastic programme of talks over two days. A broad range of research was presented, from neuroimaging studies using artificial languages, to investigating whether reading stories on iPads affects comprehension. […]

On the 20th of April Dr Catherine Jones and Zoe Williams visited from Cardiff University. Zoe gave an excellent presentation to LARA on autism spectrum disorders, ADHD and reading, which generated a really interesting discussion. Zoe’s work builds on research that Catherine and Jessie published together in 2013 on reading in adolescents with autism spectrum […]

Last week Dr Jessie Ricketts talked about her research with Dr Laura Mickes while sipping gin and tonics in the pub! You can listen to the pubcast here.