Reading Association Of Ireland Conference

The 30th Annual Conference of the Reading Association of Ireland(RAI) took place from the 28th-30th of September in St. Patrick’s College. The conference was very well attended and attracted delegates nationwide and also from the U.S.A., Canada, U.K., Poland, and Iceland. The theme of this year’s conference was  “Literacy at the Crossroads: Moving Forward, Looking Back “and provided all of those with an interest in Literacy in Ireland to pause, reflect and debate current issues in reading.

Dr. Pauric Travers, President of St. Patrick’s College and Bernadette Dwyer, President of RAI welcomed the delegates. The conference proceedings from last year ”Literacy and Language Learning. Reading in a First or Second Language” T.M. Hickey (ed) was also launched on the opening night.

Dr. Gerry Shiel in the opening keynote address “Reading Standards in Ireland: Looking Back, Looking Forward” reflected on Reading Standards in Ireland over the past twenty-five years. He noted that” despite Ireland’s high ranking in PISA 2003 there has been a significant decline in the average scores since 2000 and particularly in the scores of the highest achievers”. This attracted media attention, particularly in the Irish Independent with a headline entitled “Harry Potter generation is slipping back in reading stakes”(Friday 29th of September, John Walshe Education Editor).

Other keynote speakers addressed some of the challenges posed by the introduction to our schools of the English Curriculum in 1999. Professor Colin Harrison of the University of Nottingham, in his keynote address ” Developing Reading Comprehension: What do we need to do to make it happen?” looked at practical approaches to developing reading comprehension both in print text and crucially on the Internet. Dr. Martin Gleeson, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick presented a range of strategies to assess and support the development of reading fluency for children in the primary school in his keynote address “Promoting Effective Assessment and Instruction of Children’s Oral Reading Fluency Development”.

Dr. Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield) in her keynote address explored the issue of “Digital childhoods, digital classrooms: The teaching and learning of literacy in a new media age”.

These papers and parallel session papers and handouts will be available on the RAI website at www.reading.ie

 

 

Last Updated: Friday October 06 2006