Francesca Bentivegna summarises a recent review which suggests that schizophrenia, “personality disorders” and psychopathy may be linked to reading skills deficits in some people.
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Francesca Bentivegna summarises a recent study of the benefits of reading for pleasure in childhood, which finds an association 3 years later with consuming more fruit and being less exposed to both cigarette and alcohol use.
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Julia Badger critiques and summarises a recent randomised controlled trial testing the Let’s Talk intervention for improving children’s language development.
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Reading instruction was once a topic guaranteed to ignite passionate debate among teachers, mostly between proponents of phonics instruction and supporters of whole-language approaches. Although this particular controversy has become less heated in recent years, with many endorsing a hybrid or mixed-methods approach, there remains a great deal of interest in the relative merits of [read the full story…]
Public mental health and wellbeing has gathered greater currency following the publication of No Health without Mental Health in 2011. Public health is about improving the health of the population through preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health. Local Authorities are now the public sector organisation with lead responsibility for public health and public mental health. [read the full story…]
I remember discovering the joys of storybooks in the 1970’s, as Grandpa Elf and I would sit in the dappled shade of the trees, reading story after story set in the woodland. For human children, tucked up in their beds, tales of deadly wolves and evil grandmothers may well have had a scary edge, but [read the full story…]
Dyslexia is a specific learning disorder characterised by difficulty with spelling and decoding words. The NHS Choices website explains that people with dyslexia typically have trouble with: phonological awareness (the ability to identify the units of sound within words) verbal memory (the ability to remember a sequence of verbal information for a short period of [read the full story…]
