Jane Oakhill

Last updated
Jane Oakhill
OccupationProfessor of Experimental Psychology
Awards
  • British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (1991)
  • Society for Text and Discourse Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (2019)
Academic background
Alma mater University of Sussex
Academic work
InstitutionsUniversity of Sussex

Jane Oakhill is a British cognitive psychologist and expert on the development of reading comprehension. [1] She holds the position of Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex. [2]

Contents

Oakhill was awarded the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal [3] for early career research contributions in 1991. In 2019, she received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award [4] from the Society for Text and Discourse in 2019 in recognition of her decades-long research program on children's reading difficulties. [5] Other awards include the 2016 Research Impact Award from the University of Sussex. [2]

Oakhill has served on the Governing Board of Society for Text and Discourse [6] and on the Editorial Board of Discourse Processes. [7]

Biography

Oakhill received her Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences and Education from the University of Sussex. [2] She became a primary school teacher for two years where her experiences working with young readers sparked an interest in children’s reading comprehension problems. [8] Reflecting on her research journey, Oakhill stated, "it occurred to me that my observations about discrepancies between children’s word reading and text comprehension competence could make for an interesting research topic." [8]

Oakhill returned to the University of Sussex to pursue a PhD in the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, which was headed by Stuart Sutherland. [8] Oakhill completed her dissertation on children's reading comprehension, [9] under the supervision of Philip Johnson-Laird, in 1981. After graduating, she worked for several years with Johnson-Laird on studies of deductive reasoning [10] and discourse comprehension. [11]

After joining the faculty of the University of Sussex as a lecturer in 1990, Oakhill's primary research focus shifted back to reading comprehension and how children draw inferences while processing text. [2]

Research

Oakhill has had a prolific career researching how children learn to read, make inferences, and comprehend text. Her research program has been influenced by conversations with children and educators, [8] and has led to the development of improved methods and curriculum for teaching children how to read and learn, especially in the United Kingdom. [1] Oakhill distilled critical insights from her research into a set of key points. [12] First, teachers should model processes of analysis and inference and engage their students in discussion. Second, teachers should ask children what they don't understand in order to encourage metacognition and develop their comprehension monitoring skills. Third, teachers should avoid teaching definitions, as vocabulary should be understood rather than memorized. Oakhill argues that it is inefficient to force memorization, and that reading comprehension is enhanced through oral discussions in which ideas are questioned and debated. [12]

In her keynote address to the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, [13] Oakhill summarized key findings from research on reading comprehension. She emphasized that inference making is essential to both understanding vocabulary and reading comprehension. When readers (both adults and children) lack such skills, it affects their ability to understand what they are reading. Poor readers have difficulties thinking beyond the scope of the sentences before them and connecting notions between sentences. Such inference making is necessary to develop a coherent representation or mental model of the text. Oakhill stated that "Comprehension skills need to be taught. They don't just develop in all children." [13] She called for changes in the way reading comprehension is approached.

Oakhill has had long-standing research collaborations with Kate Cain, Alan Garnham, Nicola Yuill, and others. One of her widely-cited longitudinal studies focused on associations between working memory, inference making, comprehension monitoring, and reading comprehension in 8- to 11-year-old children. [14] The researchers found that each of these variables predicted individual differences in reading comprehension at all ages, after controlling for vocabulary knowledge and decoding (word reading) skills. Other work, focusing specifically on children with fluent and accurate word reading who exhibit poor text comprehension, failed to find a single underlying factor that would explain the children's reading difficulties. [15]

Books

Representative publications

Related Research Articles

Dyslexia Specific learning disability characterized by troubles with reading

Dyslexia, also known as reading disorder, is characterized by trouble with reading despite normal intelligence. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, "sounding out" words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads. Often these difficulties are first noticed at school. When someone who previously could read loses their ability, it is known as "alexia". The difficulties are involuntary and people with this disorder have a normal desire to learn. People with dyslexia have higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), developmental language disorders, and difficulties with numbers.

Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. In natural language, the readability of text depends on its content and its presentation. Researchers have used various factors to measure readability, such as

Speed reading

Speed reading is any of several techniques claiming to improve one's ability to read quickly. Speed-reading methods include chunking and minimizing subvocalization. The many available speed-reading training programs may utilise books, videos, software, and seminars. There is little scientific evidence regarding speed reading, and as a result its value seems uncertain. Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene says that claims of reading up to 1,000 words per minute "must be viewed with skepticism".

Mental model Explanation of someones thought process about how something works in the real world

A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about his or her own acts and their consequences. Mental models can help shape behaviour and set an approach to solving problems and doing tasks.

Reading for special needs has become an area of interest as the understanding of reading has improved. Teaching children with special needs how to read was not historically pursued due to perspectives of a Reading Readiness model. This model assumes that a reader must learn to read in a hierarchical manner such that one skill must be mastered before learning the next skill. This approach often led to teaching sub-skills of reading in a decontextualized manner. This style of teaching made it difficult for children to master these early skills, and as a result, did not advance to more advanced literacy instruction and often continued to receive age-inappropriate instruction.

Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows. Fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning of words, ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context, ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify the main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions answered in a passage, ability to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone, to understand the situational mood conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc. and finally ability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer (discourse-semantics).

A reading disability is a condition in which a sufferer displays difficulty reading. Examples of reading disabilities include: developmental dyslexia, alexia, and hyperlexia.

Peter Cathcart Wason

Peter Cathcart Wason was a cognitive psychologist at University College, London who pioneered the Psychology of Reasoning. He progressed explanations as to why people make certain consistent mistakes in logical reasoning. He designed problems and tests to demonstrate these processes, for example the Wason selection task, the THOG problem and the 2-4-6 problem. He also coined the term "confirmation bias" to describe the tendency for people to immediately favor information that validates their preconceptions, hypotheses and personal beliefs regardless of whether they are true or not.

In cognitive psychology, the missing letter effect refers to the finding that, when people are asked to consciously detect target letters while reading text, they miss more letters in frequent function words than in less frequent, content words. Understanding how, why and where this effect arises becomes useful in explaining the range of cognitive processes that are associated with reading text. The missing letter effect has also been referred to as the reverse word superiority effect, since it describes a phenomenon where letters in more frequent words fail to be identified, instead of letter identification benefitting from increased word frequency.

Reciprocal teaching is an instructional activity that takes the form of a dialogue between teachers and students regarding segments of text for the purpose of constructing the meaning of text. Reciprocal teaching is a reading technique which is thought to promote students' reading comprehension. A reciprocal approach provides students with four specific reading strategies that are actively and consciously used to support comprehension: Questioning, Clarifying, Summarizing, and Predicting. Palincsar (1986) believes the purpose of reciprocal teaching is to facilitate a group effort between teacher and students as well as among students in the task of bringing meaning to the text.

Reciprocal teaching is best represented as a dialogue between teachers and students in which participants take turns assuming the role of teacher. -Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar

The Center for Research, Evaluation and Awareness of Dyslexia is a university-based program at Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas. It was established in 1996 to:

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Reading Taking in the meaning of letters or symbols

Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.

Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) was developed in 1993 by Dr. John T. Guthrie with a team of elementary teachers and graduate students. The project designed and implemented a framework of conceptually oriented reading instruction to improve students' amount and breadth of reading, intrinsic motivations for reading, and strategies of search and comprehension. The framework emphasized five phases of reading instruction in a content domain: observing and personalizing, searching and retrieving, comprehending and integrating, communicating to others, and interacting with peers to construct meaning. CORI instruction was contrasted to experience-based teaching and strategy instruction in terms of its support for motivational and cognitive development.

Text inferencing describes that tacit or active process of logical induction or deduction during reading. Inferences are used to bridge current text ideas with antecedent text ideas of ideas in the reader's store of prior world knowledge. Text inferencing is an area of study within the field of cognitive psychology. Most of the information extracted from text is not understood as or remembered from things stated directly in that text, but from abstractions, inferences, and higher order understandings of the text material. Thus, inferences help maintain a coherent discourse representation by organizing and making sense of otherwise seemingly disjointed text ideas

The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA) is a tool to assess reading comprehension and reading accuracy. It was invented by Marie D. Neale.

Martin Braine

Martin Dimond Stewart Braine was a cognitive psychologist known for his research on the development of language and reasoning. He was Professor of Psychology at New York University at the time of his death.

Kate Nation is an experimental psychologist and expert on language and literacy development in school age children. She is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Fellow of St. John's College of the University of Oxford, where she directs the ReadOxford project and the Language and Cognitive Development Research Group.

Danielle S. McNamara is an educational researcher known for her theoretical and empirical work with reading comprehension and the development of game-based literacy technologies. She is Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Scientist at Arizona State University. She has previously held positions at University of Memphis, Old Dominion University, and University of Colorado, Boulder.

The simple view of reading is a scientific theory that a student's ability to understand written words depends on how well they sound out (decode) the words and understand the meaning of those words. Specifically, their reading comprehension can be predicted by multiplying their skill in decoding the written words by their ability to understand the meaning of those words. It is expressed in this equation:

References

  1. 1 2 "A Story in the Telling". BBC News UK. Retrieved 2020-10-22.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Jane Oakhill, Profile". profiles.sussex.ac.uk. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
  3. ↑ "Spearman Medal | BPS". www.bps.org.uk. Retrieved 2020-10-15.
  4. ↑ "Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award winners | Society for Text & Discourse" . Retrieved 2020-10-15.
  5. ↑ "2019 DSCA Winner: Jane Oakhill | Society for Text & Discourse" . Retrieved 2020-10-15.
  6. ↑ "Governing Board | Society for Text & Discourse" . Retrieved 2020-12-02.
  7. ↑ "Discourse Processes Editorial Board". www.tandfonline.com. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
  8. 1 2 3 4 "'I didn't leave it at that… I talked to them about their reading' | The Psychologist". thepsychologist.bps.org.uk. Retrieved 2020-10-22.
  9. ↑ Oakhill, J. V. (1981). Children's reading comprehension (Ph.D. thesis). University of Sussex.
  10. ↑ Oakhill, Jane; Johnson-Laird, P.N.; Garnham, Alan (1989). "Believability and syllogistic reasoning". Cognition. 31 (2): 117–140. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(89)90020-6. PMID   2721132. S2CID   23308811.
  11. ↑ Garnham, Alan; Oakhill, Jane; Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1982). "Referential continuity and the coherence of discourse". Cognition. 11 (1): 29–46. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(82)90003-8. PMID   7198951. S2CID   8636951.
  12. 1 2 Oakhill, Jane. "Four Do's and Don't's When Teaching Reading Comprehension". blog.amplify.com. Retrieved 2020-10-22.
  13. 1 2 "Prof. Jane Oakhill - EARLI 2015 Keynote". Youtube.
  14. ↑ Cain, Kate; Oakhill, Jane; Bryant, Peter (2004). "Children's Reading Comprehension Ability: Concurrent Prediction by Working Memory, Verbal Ability, and Component Skills". Journal of Educational Psychology. 96 (1): 31–42. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.96.1.31. ISSN   0022-0663.
  15. ↑ Cain, Kate; Oakhill, Jane (2006). "Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties". British Journal of Educational Psychology. 76 (4): 683–696. doi:10.1348/000709905X67610. ISSN   2044-8279. PMID   17094880.
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