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 🧵 1/

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!!

** 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?"

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🥳 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....

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."

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

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...

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 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.

** Subtitles - not a magic bullet for literacy ** Find out about our new research published in @psychscience.bsky.social. tinyurl.com/SLSubtitles @rhulpsychology.bsky.social @notts-psych.bsky.social @nuffieldfoundation.org @niftyfoxcreative.bsky.social @royalholloway.bsky.social

This Department for Education short course on ‘Supporting reading in secondary school’ is an excellent free resource with useful video to build understanding for this crucial area: www.gov.uk/government/p...

A reminder of a pretty etymology to brighten the day. The ‘daisy’ takes its name from the Old English ‘dæges ēage’, ‘day’s eye’, because it opens its petals at dawn, and closes them again at dusk.

EPS Meeting: University of Dundee. 8th – 11th July 2025. A joint meeting with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS). Submission portals for this meeting will open at 10am (UK Time) on April 7th 2025 for a minimum of 24 hours. eps.ac.uk/next-meeting/

Word of the day is ‘quiddler’ (18th century): one who focuses on unimportant issues while avoiding the important ones, or who fiddles/plays golf while Rome burns.

Very important work led by the brilliant Anastasiya Lopukhina shows that widely publicised claims about subtitles helping children learn to read need to be tempered - just published in PsychScience: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Had an amazing time talking about my work on visual word recognition and Tagalog morphology @exppsychsoc.bsky.social! 🧠🔤🔡 Thanks to everyone who attended my talk. 🫶🏻

Here's the pitch: Almost every primary school I've encountered is worried about the effectiveness of their approach to teaching reading after phonics and whether it provides pupils with engaging reading experiences. My book offers a tried-and-tested alternative.

It's not just clinical research either!

Etymology of the day: in the expression ‘just deserts’, ‘deserts’ is an old past participle of the French ‘deservir’, meaning ‘deserve’. To get your just deserts is to get what you deserve. ‘Desert’ in this sense is obsolete, which is why lexicographers see ‘just desserts’ popping up everywhere.

Today I learned that the Old English word for ‘vocabulary’ was ‘wordhoard’ and I just love it.

Our article (with @kathyrastle.bsky.social) on vocabulary in the English Lit GCSE is now out in The Use of English @englishassociation.bsky.social. We're very proud of this work and hopeful it contributes to GCSE reform for the benefit of pupils nationwide. Also available at doi.org/10.31219/osf....

1st post here! Excited to share this work with Marelli & @kathyrastle.bsky.social. We've found readers "routinely" combine constituent meanings for Chinese compound meaning, despite variability in constituent meaning and word structure, even when they're not asked to. See threads👇 for more details:

My book ‘Looking Ahead. The New Science of the Predictive Mind’ is available from today. Cambridge has provided a temporary promo code, if you enter HUETT24 and order via the CUP website you get 20% off any version (hardback, paperback, or ebook) www.cambridge.org/de/universit...

Word of the day is ‘huff-snuff’ (16th century): a hectoring bully or braggart.

Third graders in Steubenville, Ohio, are among the best little readers in the nation. For nearly 20 years, the elementary schools in this economically depressed area have produced better readers than some of the wealthiest places in the country. www.apmreports.org/story/2025/0...

Applications for the ninth summer school on statistical methods for linguistics and psychology close on April 1, 2025. Every year people contact me saying they missed the call, so here it is again :) vasishth.github.io/smlp2025/

Brutal takedown of reading policy in Wales and Scotland, as Northern Ireland looks to change course with its new strategy based around phonics. @kathyrastle.bsky.social makes several important (and apparently still necessary) observations about the evidence on reading. www.itv.com/news/2025-02...

(@kathyrastle.bsky.social famously showed that in reading 'brother' primes 'broth' because it could be parsed as 'broth' + 'er' absent accessing its meaning, but not 'brothel'. But, this is an audio podcast!! )

I have a section on my website where I document psycholinguistically interesting phenomena in the wild. This is from Hey Riddle Riddle Episode #225 'Welcome to the Riddle Dome Part 2', 8:43 headgum.com/hey-riddle-r...

This is probably the most important book that any primary teacher or leader will read. I know that’s a big statement & I don’t make it lightly. There is nothing more important than getting every child reading fluently. This book provides a clear framework to make that happen.

This is a wonderful book that dives into every aspect of how to teach children to read well: organising instruction, building a reading curriculum and culture, leading whole-school change. It belongs in every primary school. 📚💯💥

This is a wonderful book that dives into every aspect of how to teach children to read well: organising instruction, building a reading curriculum and culture, leading whole-school change. It belongs in every primary school. 📚💯💥

Happy to share that Liz Schotter and I have just published a beginner-level tutorial introduction to eye-tracking-while-reading studies in Behavior Methods: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Very pleased to see the Experimental Psychology Society here. Their London meeting this week was great as always. Whether you’re a familiar or new member, or just a curious aspiring psychologist please follow the @exppsychsoc.bsky.social and check out their meetings and support!

Word of the Day is one I keep posting at the end of the year, hoping its time will come. ‘Respair’, from the 16th century, is fresh hope, and a recovery from despair. Here’s to a few drops of respair in 2025.

Oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in Syria www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The main drivers of this success in England: 1. Phonics 2. Knowledge-rich emphases 3. Focussing on sequenced curriculums 4. Clearer behaviour guidance based on the behaviour curriculum, boundaries, consequences and support. 5. Teacher training/ ECT reform 6. Assessment clearly linked to curriculum

If a child received a treatment known to be flawed in hospital, it wouldn’t be surprising to seek redress in court. We should not accept this in education either.

Step 1 is increasing access. Step 2 is about quality and results. Step 1 is far easier (and less controversial) than Step 2.

Our Journal Club meets monthly to explore word research! Join us tomorrow (Dec 5) as we discuss "Inadequate foundational decoding skills constrain global literacy goals for pupils in low- and middle-income countries" by Michael Crawford, Neha Raheel, @mariakna.bsky.social & @kathyrastle.bsky.social.