Prof Anne Castles (Australian Catholic University)

Title: Word learning in adolescent readers

Abstract:

Formal reading instruction typically concludes at the end of the primary school years, with children assumed to transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”. Yet the results of both national and international studies show that as much as 30% of secondary school students still struggle with literacy, including at the individual word level. In this talk, I will describe recent research we have carried out on word learning in adolescent students, including on the effect of pre-existing vocabulary knowledge and level of exposure. I also discuss word learning in digital contexts, and report on experimental research conducted on facilitating word learning in noisy environments.  The results will be considered in the context of theories of reading development and implications for classroom practice.

Bio:

Anne Castles is an ARC Laureate Fellow, based at the Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy at Australian Catholic University.  Her research focuses on learning to read and reading disorders, with a particular interest in different processes in reading and how they are learned. Her Laureate research program explores the under-researched area of literacy in adolescents. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA) and the Royal Society of NSW (FRSN), and serves on the Editorial Boards of several major journals. In 2018, she served as President of Learning Difficulties Australia.