Kathy Rastle

Assessing Text Experience in British Primary School Children: New Validated Title and Author Recognition Tests - Holly Cooper, Maria Korochkina, Marc Brysbaert, Kathleen Rastle, 2026 Becoming a skilled reader requires that children accumulate extensive experience with text through independent reading. Research shows that greater text experie...

**New** validated Title Recognition and Author Recognition Tests to measure text experience in primary school children, with Holly Cooper, @mariakna.bsky.social, and Marc Brysbaert. #OA @qjep.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Who is thinking of going to the joint ESCOP-China meeting?

Literacy

**New** chapter on “Literacy” just published in the Open Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science. The whole series is super, accessible chapters and no paywalls, a great resource for teaching. oecs.mit.edu/pub/epclh9no...

There is so much to know and do when it comes to literacy, but my new book offers every teacher strong foundations.

It addresses reading, writing, talk, vocabulary, literacy assessment, and literacy & SEND.

'Literacy Essentials for Every Teacher'

Pre-order here: www.amazon.co.uk/Literacy-Ess...

What advice would you give to someone putting together a funding proposal?

Tune into this funding-focused episode of #ConfessionsOfAnECR where Professor @annavignoles.bsky.social demystifies the steps to an effective proposal and what funders are really looking for.

🎬 youtu.be/AjyHKRjC-v4?...

Kerry James Marshall review – astonishing visions of black America, from bar-room boozers to families in space Kidnappings, enslavement, cops and squad cars, golfers, picnics, croquet-players, interstellar travellers … the US artist’s largest ever European show takes in an extraordinary range of experience in ...

Saw the Kerry James Marshall exhibition at the RA for the second time today. Do go if you get the chance (only one week left). Beautiful, uplifting, thought provoking, challenging, shocking at the same time. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Delighted to announce that I’ll be joining Royal Holloway as the ESRC-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the skilled Arabic reading project, working with Professor @kathyrastle.bsky.social , Professor @denisdrieghe.bsky.social and Dr Sami Boudelaa. A 3-year position starting February 2026. 😀

Can same‑language subtitles help children learn to read? - The Children’s Media Foundation (CMF) Only a few studies have tested whether same-language subtitles help children become better readers, and their findings are mixed. To provide an evidence-based answer, the Nuffield Foundation recently ...

Do subtitles help children learn to read? Read our blog for the Children's Media Foundation to find out! www.thechildrensmediafoundation.org/archives/170...

Heard the myths about phonics? It’s time to bust them with the evidence to back it up!
📅 Join award-winning Prof @kathyrastle.bsky.social on 26 Nov for a live 45-minute webinar, open to all Little Wandle members.
💬 Stay on for a Q&A with Kathy herself!
🎟️ Book your place via the Ongoing CPD calendar.

Exclusive: A member of the Welsh Government’s expert literacy panel has resigned, warning the new £8.2m national programme to improve reading is “flawed” and “not fit for purpose”.

Full story below
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Special event for all the Little Wandlers out there!

Enjoyed writing this new manuscript with @dkcayado.bsky.social. We describe morphological systems that differ substantially from English, and show why these pose interesting questions for theories of reading. We argue that it's time to cast a wider net in this field.

I am guest editing a special issue—"New Perspectives on the Mental Lexicon" in @qjep.bsky.social with @kathyrastle.bsky.social and Jo Taylor. Expression of interest until 20th Dec. Get in touch!

Looking forward to this session with Little Wandle colleagues!!

Job Opportunity at Royal Holloway University of London: Postdoctoral Research Fellow Applications are invited for a 3-year, full-time Postdoctoral Research Fellow position in the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.This position is funded by an ESRC resear...

** New ** Seeking Postdoctoral Research Fellow (3 yrs) for ESRC project on skilled reading in Arabic. Based in my lab at @rhulpsychology.bsky.social and collaborating with @denisdrieghe.bsky.social (Soton) and Sami Boudelaa (UAE). Please share! jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

Academic papers ask "Does X improve learning?" but schools need to know "Does X improve learning enough to justify its implementation costs compared to alternative Y?"

I just paid £9 for each pair of branded socks (for a state school).

🎯

AJLD EMINENT RESEARCHER AWARD WINNER 2024 Professor James Chapman: The rise and demise of reading recovery in New Zealand Reading Recovery (RR) was introduced throughout New Zealand during the 1980s, for children struggling the most with learning to read after 1 year of formal schooling. In May 2024, the Minister of E...

🥳 The ‘holy grail’ of reading inventions that was birthed in NZ & exported to the world has finally been dumped. Now the way is clear for children to receive scientifically-based instruction & stop being instructional casualties. H/T @kathyrastle.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Did you read the blog and the Times article it was responding to?

I’m starting to get threatening emails from predatory journals. They are accusing me of deliberately not responding to their requests to publish a two-page paper in a journal from a different discipline and saying that I need to respond with 24 hr to “end it smoothly”. 🤣

"Systematic phonics... is affordable, replicable and deliverable across thousands of state schools.... That matters. In education, if it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work."

More Than Words by Maryellen MacDonald, PhD: 9780593545270 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books "This beautifully written book by Maryellen MacDonald demonstrates how 'word-work' shapes both our experience of the world and the very brain that produced our capacity to articulate and generate our ...

Thrilled to announce that my book MORE THAN WORDS (Avery/Penguin Random House) is out! It explains why language production has huge positive effects on talkers: attention, emotion regulation, exec function & more. Accessible science for general audiences! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724046...

I had to read this several times as “prioritise growth” and “hit universities over the head” are so mutually contradictory

Thanks Megan!

Great blog about how children learn about morphology- @dccolen.bsky.social has been looking at this too and has some interesting ideas about how to structure the teaching in schools…

Couldn’t agree more… spelling teaching is patchy! And driven by an exam in Yr6.

bsky.app/profile/kath...

Psycholinguistic Databases, Stimuli, Utilities — Concepts & Cognition Laboratory

Updated our lab's psycholinguistic database page to include Kathy Rastle et al's new web interface for the Children and Young Peoples Books Lexicon (CYP-LEX). Check it out! Give me a holler if you want us to link to your dataset or know of others I've missed. www.reilly-coglab.com/data

What can children learn about morphology from reading for fun? A key part of becoming a skilled reader is understanding how words are built — that is, how small parts of words that carry meaning come together to form words. For example, the word unhappy is made u...

What can children learn about morphology when they read for pleasure? We analysed the words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people to find out! Read the blog post here: www.rastlelab.com/post/what-ca...

** New resource ** We analysed the characteristics of words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people. Properties of each word (frequencies, etc) are now available in an interactive website.
cyp-lex.rastlelab.com

Campaign groups in the US, UK and India claim that TV subtitles will help children learn to read. But our new research published in @psychscience.bsky.social shows that children don't even look at subtitles until they can already read at around 1 word per second.