Event Resources:  Video recording and slides.  Learn more

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About our presenter:  Tanya Serry BAppSc (Speech Pathology), MA (Applied Linguistics), PhD

Associate Professor (Literacy and Reading), School of Education, La Trobe University

Tanya’s research interests centre on the policy and practices of evidence-based reading instruction and intervention practices for students across the educational lifespan, as well as the experiences of parents, educators and allied professionals who engage with the Science of Reading. She was the recent past Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties and currently serves on the editorial board. Tanya is a Fellow of Speech Pathology Australia  and an elected board member of the Ethics Board for Speech Pathology Australia. She is an active researcher and a member of several interdisciplinary research teams both within and external to La Trobe University and provides advice on literacy to school systems and government agencies. Tanya co-founded the SOLAR Lab (Science of Language and Reading) at La Trobe University with Professor Pamela Snow.

About the webinar:  Reading Comprehension: Exploring the cognitive foundations of learning to read.

The ultimate aim of reading is to extract and gain meaning from written text. Reading comprehension is a multiply determined skillset and accordingly, instruction and intervention must acknowledge and abide by the various elements required for reading comprehension proficiency.

In this seminar, I will frame reading comprehension using the Cognitive Foundations of Learning to read Model (Tunmer & Hoover, 2019), to explore the elements underlying reading comprehension. These include both code-based knowledge and linguistic knowledge. We will also explore the influence of background knowledge, text density and text cohesion on reading comprehension and discuss how we can support readers to develop a greater dynamic representation or ‘situation model’ (Kintsch, 2009) to enhance reading comprehension.