Psychology research demonstrates the importance of discourse skills to improve reading comprehension

Approximately ten percent of children globally have reading comprehension skills that are significantly behind their word reading ability. This affects their educational success, future employment options, income, and health outcomes. Improvements in literacy skills could break family cycles of poverty and disadvantage.

Award-winning research by Professor Kate Cain has demonstrated the importance of three discourse-level language skills for successful reading comprehension: inference and integration, knowledge and use of text structure, and comprehension monitoring.

She has worked directly with schools, practitioners, and policymakers nationally and internationally to re-design curricula and create learning and assessment tools that incorporate these skills.

Specifically Professor Cain’s research has:

• Resulted in the inclusion of these skills in the Programme of Study for English for the National Curriculum (2014) for children in England in Key Stages 1 & 2. Approximately 6.7 million children have benefitted from enriched reading comprehension skill instruction.
• Informed successful training and support programmes to improve reading comprehension, reaching 6,000 school leadership teams and over 250,000 children worldwide.
• Enriched awareness and understanding of the skills required for good reading comprehension of more than 20,000 education and healthcare professionals globally.
• Been recognised by the International Dyslexia Association, who awarded her their highest honour - the Samuel Torrey Orton Award (2014), and ESRC, who awarded her runner-up in their Outstanding Impact in Society Award (2016).