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Professor Jane Oakhill and Dr Susan Sullivan’s previous research addresses the nature of children’s problems with text comprehension, including the particular difficulties experienced by children with hearing impairments (HI).  That research has now been extended to include the difficulties blind children, and children with visual impairments (VI), experience with text comprehension (compared with both children without impairments, and HI children), and will explore ways in which text comprehension can be supported and improved in children with visual impairments.

In Year 1 of the project (2014-2015) we will be working closely with educators of children with VI, the parents of children with VI, and with the children themselves in their schools, profiling the abilities of VI children across a number of component skills involved in good text comprehension (e.g., inference making skills, the understanding of story structure, vocabulary knowledge). 

In Year 2 of the project (2015-2016) we will be adapting text intervention strategies for use with VI children, aimed at training and supporting reading comprehension skills.