• UKLA Awards
• UKLA Children’s Book Award 2011
• UKLA Children’s Book Award 2010
• UKLA Children’s Book Awards 2009
• UKLA Author Award
• John Downing Award
• Student Research Awards
• UKLA / Wiley Blackwell Research in Literacy Education Award 2009
  • UKLA/Wiley Blackwell Research in Literacy Education Award 2008

UKLA / Wiley Blackwell Research in Literacy Education Award 2009

The UKLA/ Wiley-Blackwell Research in Literacy Education Award is a prestigious prize bestowed on the best publication to the Journal of Research in Reading and Literacy in the previous year. Both are peer-reviewed journals with international reputations for excellence.

Award Winners 2009

Journal of Research in Reading

Kendeou,P., Bohn-Gettler, C. White, M.J. & van den Broek, P. (2008) Children’s inference generation across different media.
Journal of Research in Reading, Vol 31 (3) pp 259-272.

Highy commended:
Mangen, A.  (2008) Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion
Journal of Research in Reading, Vol 31, (4) pp 404-419.

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Literacy

Cremin, T. Mottram, M., Collins, F., Powell, S. & Safford, K. (2009) Teachers as readers: Building communities of readers. Literacy, Vol. 43 (1) pp 1-11.

This year, the award for the best publication in Journal of Research in Reading was given to a report written by Kendeou et al., an American team who investigated children’s ability to make inferences about stories presented in different media e.g. televised and written stories. They found that children’s inference generation across media were inter-related and that this inference generation contributed significantly to children’s narrative comprehension over and above basic language skills, vocabulary and media factors. The paper suggested that the capacity to generate inferences was independent of medium and the panel felt this was a significant contribution to knowledge.

The award for the best publication in Literacy was given to a paper written by Cremin et al. This team reported on a year-long study in five Local Authorities in England, Teachers as Readers: Building Communities of Readers, which aimed to explore how teachers’ knowledge and experience of children’s literature could be enhanced in order to help them increase children’s motivation and enthusiasm for reading. The findings suggest that teachers need support if they are to develop children’s reading for pleasure, as many have a limited knowledge of children’s literature themselves and the panel considered that the study had important implications for teachers’ professional development. 

This year, the panel also recommended that a paper in the Journal of Research in Reading was highly commended. Mangen’s paper reflected on the differences between the role of our bodies, and in particular our fingers and hands, for the immersive fiction reading experience in both print format and on screen, such as Amazon’s ‘Kindle’ e-reader. The paper’s theoretical argument potentially made a highly significant contribution in drawing our attention to the materiality of texts in the processes of meaning-making, specifically the physical intervention into on-line texts through ‘pressing’ hyperlinks.

The awards will be presented at the international UKLA conference in Greenwich on July 11th 2009.

Panel chair: Professor Jackie Marsh