The Wordworks team was privileged to spend some time with Jane Oakhill, Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex, and Prof Carsten Elbro, an expert on dyslexia from the University of Copenhagen. Jane was one of the keynote speakers at the recent 2017 LITASA conference where she presented on ways to support children who struggle with text comprehension.
We loved Jane’s comment that we don’t need to wait until children can read before we start building comprehension – we can start with talking!
We also loved the idea of asking children what they know about the meaning of a word – this is the way we build webs of understanding about words and deep vocabulary knowledge.