Outreach contributions

  • Korochkina, M., & Rastle K. (2024). What words do children encounter when they read for pleasure? Nomanis, Issue 17 (This article originally appeared on the Rastle Lab blog).

  • Korochkina, M., & Rastle K. (2024). What does it take to read and understand the GCSE English Literature texts? Talk given at the Working Together: Research and Practice event 2024, The South East Research Network for Schools, Egham, UK, 21 June 2024. [slides]

  • Korochkina, M., & Rastle K. (2024). What words do children encounter when they read for pleasure? Accessible blog post.

CYP-LEX - A large-scale lexical database of books read by British children aged 7-16

The CYP-LEX project is a collaboration with Kathy Rastle, Marc Brysbaert, and Marco Marelli. The aim of this work was to create a lexical database of words that British children aged 7-16 encounter when they read for pleasure. To this end, we built a corpus of 1,200 books popular with children and young people in the UK, and analysed the properties of words used in these books. The associated research article came out in March 2024, and is publicly available and free to download. We also wrote an accessible blog post explaining the key insights from our analysis.

Within a month of its publication, our paper has attracted a lot of attention from teachers, teacher educators, and literacy charities (see below). It has been highlighted that the “implications [of this research] can be profound for the choices we make to help pupils learn language”.

  • Both the research article and the associated blog post viewed and downloaded more than 1,500 times
  • In the top 5% of research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric
  • Featured in publications aimed at education professionals, e.g., tes, 3Rs newsletter by Alex Quigley