Daisy Powell

I am Associate Professor in the Psychology of Written Language at the Institute of Education, University of Reading. I hold a PhD in Psychology from Royal Holloway, University of London, where my doctoral research used experimental and computational modelling methods to investigate how children develop orthographic and phonological knowledge as they learn to read. I then held postdoctoral research positions at Birkbeck, London, Carnegie Mellon University in the US and the UCL IoE, before moving into academic posts at Roehampton University and then Reading.

My early research focused on the cognitive processes involved in learning to read and spell, including phonological awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming. Over time, my interests have broadened to encompass the social, environmental and pedagogical factors that also shape children's literacy development, such as the home literacy environment and classroom practice. A significant strand of this work looks at literacy in multilingual and bilingual contexts: I have researched biliteracy development among Malay-English bilingual children in Malaysia, and supervised doctoral research on reading and reading-related skills in Arabic-English and Greek-English bilingual children in the UK and abroad. I am also interested in book-sharing practices, including how storybook reading and dialogic reading interventions support young children's language and literacy development, particularly in low-income and multilingual families. I led a Nuffield-funded projects investigating the impact of a dialogic book-sharing programme in UK Children's Centres on later language and literacy skills at school entry.

I have published in journals including the Journal of Educational Psychology, Scientific Studies of Reading, and the Journal of Research in Reading, and I hold or have held research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation, the British Academy and the Department for Education. I am co-editor of the upcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of Literacy.