Event resources:  Video recording and slides.  Learn more.

About our presenter:  Professor Pamela Snow  -  Professor of Cognitive Psychology 

Pamela Snow is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology in the School of Education at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University, Australia. She is also Co-Director of the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab. 

Pamela is a registered psychologist, having qualified originally in speech-language pathology and has taught a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate education and health professionals. Her research has been funded by nationally competitive schemes such as the ARC Discovery Program, ARC Linkage Program, and the Criminology Research Council, and concerns the role of language and literacy skills as academic and mental health protective factors in childhood and adolescence. She has conducted research on the profiles and needs of high-risk groups such as youth offenders, children and adolescents in the state care system and flexible education systems, as well as research advancing evidence in the language-to-literacy transition in the early years of school. In 2020, Pamela established, with her colleague, Professor Tanya Serry, The Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab in the School of Education at La Trobe University.

Pamela’s research has been published in a wide range of international journals and she was a member of the 2017 National Year 1 Literacy and Numeracy Panel, convened by the Hon. Simon Birmingham, Federal Education Minister.  She is a Life Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a past Victorian State Chair of the Australian Psychological Society. Pamela has over 170 publications, comprising refereed papers, books and book chapters, monographs and research reports. In addition to these academic outputs, Pamela writes a popular blog for teachers, parents, and clinicians: The Snow Report - https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com and is a founding Associate Editor of The Reading League Journal. 

About the webinar:  Supporting literacy growth in years 3-8. The reading comprehension assembly line.

For teachers and speech pathologists. This presentation will focus on the need to be intentional and explicit in supporting students’ ongoing reading comprehension skills, once they are proficient and automatic with respect to their decoding/word identification skills. In her 2021 text The reading comprehension blueprint, Nancy Hennessy describes comprehension as being like a factory assembly line, comprising many complex and inter-related skills and processes. In this presentation, there will be a focus on vocabulary growth, sentence and text-level comprehension, inferencing, and the ongoing importance of building background knowledge via a knowledge-rich curriculum.  Includes Q&A.