Julie Dockrell

Julie Dockrell
University College London | UCL · Department of Psychology and Human Development

About

263
Publications
219,691
Reads
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7,731
Citations
Citations since 2017
78 Research Items
4242 Citations
20172018201920202021202220230200400600800
20172018201920202021202220230200400600800
20172018201920202021202220230200400600800
20172018201920202021202220230200400600800
Additional affiliations
January 2004 - December 2012
University of London
January 2004 - December 2008
London South Bank University
January 2000 - December 2012
University College London
Education
September 1981 - June 1983
University of Glasgow
Field of study
  • Educational Psychology
September 1977 - September 1980
University of Stirling
Field of study
  • Psychology

Publications

Publications (263)
Technical Report
Full-text available
This report describes a RCT of Talking Time© in areas of significant social disadvantage. Talking Time© is a universal intervention targeting the oral language skills of children aged between 3 to 5 years of age. The intervention is designed to support early years’ practitioners to deliver a programme of engaging structured activities to children i...
Chapter
This chapter considers the proximal and distal skills which impact on children’s developing writing competencies. We examine three dimensions: text-based factors, child-based factors, and the role of writing instruction in supporting struggling writers. Text-based factors include writing levels (word sentence and discourse), writing genre, and the...
Article
Full-text available
IntroductionRepresentations activated during handwriting production code information on morphological structure and reflect decomposition of the root and suffix. Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have significant difficulties in spelling morphologically complex words, but previous research has not sought evidence for a morphologic...
Article
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Individual differences in children’s social communication have been shown to mediate the relationship between poor vocabulary or grammar and behavioural difficulties. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that social communication skills predict difficulties with peers over and above vocabulary and grammar scores. The essential social communicativ...
Article
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Abstract School classrooms within the EU are multilingual learning environments. The diversity of pupils in classrooms raises significant challenges for teachers, but to date, there are no data from large-scale surveys that compare views within and across European countries. A bespoke questionnaire was designed to examine views of current classroom...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Writing is key to academic success and job opportunities later in life. Nevertheless, every year children leave primary school struggling to write and few assessments enable schools to reliably identify and target weaknesses in children’s writing. This study explored curriculum-based measures of writing (CBM-W) for assessing writing in primary...
Article
Full-text available
Developing writing skills is a central part of the education curriculum in many countries, yet numerous children have difculties in producing written texts. To our knowledge there is no systematic study examining the ways in which Greek teachers adapt their writing instruction strategies to accommodate the children’s needs. The aim of the present...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose This study offers the first description of misspellings across elementary school using the Phonological, Orthographic and Morphological Assessment of Spelling (POMAS), a linguistic framework based on Triple Word Form theory, adapted for French (POMAS-FR). It aims to test the “universality” of POMAS and its suitability to track development i...
Article
Domain-specific observational tools that use valid and objectively measurable items are key to supporting improvement and developing understanding of practice in early years classrooms. The ‘Emergent Literacy and Language Early Childhood Checklist for Teachers’ (ELLECCT) aims to address a current gap in the tools that are available to capture behav...
Article
Full-text available
Children from areas of social disadvantage experience delays in their language development, with significant numbers of children entering nursery classes with limited oral language skills. These difficulties are exacerbated when a child’s home language is not the language of instruction. This causes challenges for early years practitioners in devel...
Article
Full-text available
There has been a resurgence in concern about the levels of pupils’ oral language skills at school entry. To support and develop these skills effectively an understanding of the key components of oral language is required. We examined the oral language skills of monolingual children in Reception (MAge = 57.9 months; n = 126) and Year 1 (MAge = 69.07...
Chapter
This chapter examines the assessment of writing as writers move from the initial stages of learning to write (novices) to becoming more proficient writers. Challenges in what to assess and how writing can be assessed are examined. Both writing product and process measures are considered and the impact of proximal and distal factors on writing outli...
Article
Full-text available
Children who struggle with writing are a heterogeneous group and may experience difficulties in a range of domains, including spelling, reading, and oral language. These difficulties are reflected in their writing and may influence their responsiveness to writing interventions. The effectiveness of a targeted sentence-combining intervention to impr...
Article
Purpose This scoping review aims to identify and analyze the nature of the spelling errors produced by children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different orthographies. Building on a previous meta-analysis identifying the extent of the spelling difficulties of children with DLD, the review extends our understanding of the nature o...
Article
Executive functions are a set of cognitive processes we use to act on information, manage resources, and plan and monitor our own behaviour, all with the aim of achieving an end goal. These are skills that develop from infancy. While ‘reading’ has been extensively studied in psychology literature, ‘writing’ has been somewhat neglected, despite a la...
Article
Full-text available
Englicious is an approach to grammar teaching underpinned by linguistics research that is supported by an extensive set of website resources (www.englicious.org). Englicious combines formal grammar teaching, that is specified in England’s national curriculum, with emphasis on how this grammar links with some of the processes of writing. The approac...
Article
Full-text available
The Sustainable Development Goals mandate that by 2030, all children should have access to quality early child development opportunities, healthcare and pre-primary education. Yet validated measures of ECD in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rare. To address this gap, a Systematic Review (SR) of measures available to profile the developm...
Article
Full-text available
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-021-00539-z
Article
Full-text available
Oral language skills underpin children’s educational success and enhance positive life outcomes. Yet, significant numbers of children struggle to develop competence in speaking and listening, especially those from areas of high economic deprivation. A tiered intervention model, graduating the level of provision in line with levels of need, has been...
Article
Full-text available
School classrooms within the EU are multilingual learning environments. The diversity of pupils in classrooms raises significant challenges for teachers, but to date, there are no data from large-scale surveys that compare views within and across European countries. A bespoke questionnaire was designed to examine views of current classroom learning...
Article
Full-text available
School classrooms within the EU are multilingual learning environments. The diversity of pupils in classrooms raises significant challenges for teachers, but to date, there are no data from large-scale surveys that compare views within and across European countries. A bespoke questionnaire was designed to examine views of current classroom learning...
Article
Full-text available
Pdf of ideas and activities for supporting language development in preschool children. Also available online: https://sway.office.com/mpk2tWuDXFfDECmV?ref=Link
Article
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Language problems are a risk factor for externalizing problems, but the developmental path remains unclear. Emotional competence may mediate the relationship, especially when externalizing problems are reactive in nature, such as in Oppositional Deviant Disorder (ODD) and reactive aggression. We examined the development of reactive and proactive ex...
Article
Full-text available
Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often struggle learning to spell. However, it is still unclear where their spelling difficulties lie, and whether they reflect on-going difficulties with specific linguistic domains. It is also unclear whether the spelling profiles of these children vary in different orthographies. The present stu...
Article
Full-text available
Learning to write effectively is key for learning and participation in social communities. In English, transcription skills (handwriting and spelling) constrain written production at the early stages of learning to write. The effect of transcription diminishes with age, when reading skills enhance text production. Less is known about how transcript...
Article
Full-text available
Multilingualism is a major feature of European schools. The current study examines Danish data regarding teachers’ behaviours, beliefs and attitudes about multilingualism. Data were collected using the Multilingual Classroom Questionnaire (MCQ) devised by the European Literacy Network. Sixty-one participants contributed to the Danish sample (85% fe...
Article
Full-text available
The report of the Warnock Committee “Special Educational Needs,” published in 1978, provided the first comprehensive review of special educational needs (SEN) in England and the basis for subsequent legislation, from the Education Act 1981 to the recent Children and Families Act 2014. The Warnock Report has been highly influential with respect to t...
Article
Full-text available
Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we c...
Article
Full-text available
A Europa é uma realidade linguística diversa e heterogénea que enfrenta o desafio de educar uma população cada vez mais multicultural e multilingue. Os professores de língua(s) são atores nesta realidade, promovendo o multilinguismo e integrando a diversidade. Portugal não foge ao paradigma do multilinguismo e as escolas e professores portugueses v...
Article
Full-text available
This GWRP will evaluate the effectiveness of the manualised Englicious approach to teaching grammar with the aim of improving pupils’ writing. Englicious is an innovative web-based approach to grammar teaching. It has not yet been subject to an experimental trial of its effectiveness. We propose a randomised controlled efficacy trial as the most ro...
Article
Full-text available
Europe is a diverse and heterogeneous linguistic community that faces the challenge of educating an increasingly multicultural and multilingual population. Language teachers are key players on this regard as they may foster multilingualism and contribute to students’ inclusion in their classrooms. Portugal is no exception and Portuguese schools and...
Article
The nature of ‘Teacher talk’ is likely to have a considerable bearing on the child’s learning but measuring the communication environment in the classroom can present challenges. One tool which does this is the Communication Supporting Classroom Observation Tool (CSCOT). Initial use suggested that it was valid and reliably used by specialists (psyc...
Article
Planning plays an important role in the production of written texts. Little is known about why children plan and the plans they create when they are not explicitly instructed. This study explores the plans that elementary school children in Years 1, 3, and 5 create before writing a text. We compared performance of children educated in Catalan and i...
Article
Full-text available
Background and aims There is a paucity of literature investigating health-related quality of life in neurodevelopmental populations including children with developmental language disorders and children with autism spectrum disorder. Health-related quality of life in these two groups remains poorly understood. Furthermore, studies have typically rel...
Article
Full-text available
A central conceptual change in the Warnock report, the first type report of a UK government committee on the education of children and young people with all types of special educational needs (Department for Education and Science, 1978), was the shift from categorization of children and young people by handicap to the identification of individuals'...
Article
An investigation has been carried out to examine the impact of different levels of classroom noise on adolescents’ performance on reading and vocabulary-learning tasks. A total of 976 English high school pupils (564 aged 11 to 13 years and 412 aged 14 to 16 years) completed reading tasks on laptop computers while exposed to different levels of clas...
Article
Full-text available
The association between empathy and friendship quality in children and adolescents is well established, but longitudinal studies are lacking. Because social interactions typically involve language, these relations might be moderated by children's communication problems. The current study examined the interrelation of friendship quality (positive an...
Article
Conceptualising the difficulties experienced by struggling writers in middle elementary school is of both theoretical and practical importance. To further our understanding of the problems experienced by struggling writers we aimed to identify the writing measure which best discriminated struggling writers from their peers, and the proximal and dis...
Article
Full-text available
Well, the speech–language therapist comes to talk to us occasionally, but they don't help children anymore. (head teacher response to the governing body when asked about the provision for children with language deficits within a mainstream primary school)
Article
Aims The role of educational psychologists (EPs) in relation to Speech, Language and Communication Needs (SLCN) has been relatively unexplored and when studies have targeted the role of EPs, their role has been at best peripheral. This paper aims to show how the re-alignment of EP practice could be made through exploring the different perspectives...
Article
Full-text available
In previous studies, children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have been found to have more difficulties with processing speed, working memory, and attentional tasks. The present study aimed to compare the cognitive variables (working memory and processing speed) and the attentional profiles of a sample of students with and with...
Data
3D virtual glasses of AULA Nesplora test. The 3d virtual glasses allows to obtain a motor activity indicator to value the possible hyperactivity problems. (JPG)
Data
Virtual classroom provided by AULA Nesplora test. Virtual classroom environment where the patient does the tasks which are explained by a virtual teacher. (TIF)
Data
Database used for the present study. (SAV)
Data
Age effect on AULA Nesplora variables. (TIF)
Article
Full-text available
Background Depressive symptoms are common in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, risk and protective factors contributing to these problems are currently underspecified. Aims The current longitudinal study examined the role of emotion‐regulation (ER) strategies in the severity of depressive symptoms in children with and w...
Article
Full-text available
Spelling difficulties often occur in children with developmental language disorder (DLD), the extent and drivers of these difficulties are underspecified. Meta-analyses were conducted to address this gap. We identified child-based factors (age, language spoken, profile of difficulties) and task-based factors (text production or dictation) as potent...
Article
Purpose: Victimization is a common problem for many children but is exacerbated for children with a developmental language disorder (DLD). However, the severity of communication problems does not explain their victimization rates. In children without DLD, difficulties with emotional competence are a risk factor for victimization and also increase...
Article
Background Oral language skills are the foundation for success at school and in employment. A significant minority of children experience difficulties in the acquisition of oral language resulting in speech and language needs (SLN). There are disjunctures between clinical studies using standardised assessment and educational studies. The current st...
Conference Paper
It has been known for many years that poor acoustic conditions in classrooms leading to high noise levels and poor speech intelligibility cause annoyance to pupils and teachers and affect the academic performance of pupils. Much of the previous research concerning the impact of noise and poor acoustics on pupils has involved children in primary sch...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This report reviews assessments for children under 6 in the UK for language literacy, numeracy and social emotional development. It also includes information about tools for assessing the home and early years environment
Article
We completed a systematic search of measures to assess language, literacy, numeracy, and socialemotional development for children up to the age of six. These included individual assessments of children’s competencies in these areas and assessments of the children’s home and early years environment. A review of the relevant competencies for these fo...
Data
Appendix S2. Background document, with the statements for round 2.
Data
Appendix S1. Background document, with the statements for round 1.
Data
Appendix S4. Report showing quantitative and qualitative responses to Round 1 statements.
Data
Appendix S3. Relationship between Round 2 statements and final statements reported in Results section.
Data
Appendix S5. Report showing quantitative and qualitative responses to Round 2 statements.
Article
Full-text available
Teachers and speech and language therapists (SLTs) share concern about children’s speech, language, and communication needs (SLCNs) but they have different foci because of their professional roles. Contemporary research has identified the challenges to schools when meeting the needs of children with SLCN, highlighted terminological controversies, a...