Ending the Reading Wars Seminar
- Time:
- 13:00 - 14:00
- Date:
- 6 March 2019
- Venue:
- University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Building 46 (Physics), Room 2003 (L/T B)
For more information regarding this seminar, please telephone Sue McNally on 02380 595150 or email sm28@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Visiting speaker hosted by Dr Denis Drieghe from the Centre for Vision and Cognition (CVC)
There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions, but this research has been slow to make inroads into policy and practice. Instead the field has been plagued by decades of "reading wars". This talk will provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in our understanding of reading acquisition, and will evaluate the fit between this scientific understanding and public policy. I will argue that it is time to end the reading wars, in favour of an agenda that is developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how writing systems work.
Speaker information
Professor Kathy Rastle, Royal Holloway, University of London. Professor Rastle's research aims to uncover the nature of the mental representations and computations that underlie aspects of human cognition, within an interdisciplinary perspective that includes Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Science, and Experimental Phonetics. Within the broad area of human cognition, her primary interest lies in understanding fundamental aspects of the normal language system and how they become impaired as the result of brain damage or abnormal development. Her work is funded by project grants from the BBSRC, ESRC, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust.