Charles Hulme is Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Education and William Golding Senior Research Fellow at Brasenose College.
He has broad research interests in reading, language and memory processes and their development and is an expert on randomized controlled trials in Education. His work on reading development has made important contributions to understanding the role of phonological skills in learning to read. He has also explored the role of wider language skills (particularly vocabulary knowledge and grammatical skills) as influences on the development of reading comprehension.
In April 2021 it was announced that an Oxford team, led by Charles and Maggie Snowling, has developed the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) programme which improves oral language skills in young children. As a result of official funding, it is hoped that all primary schools in England that want it, will benefit from the Oxford oral language programme. Last autumn, the Department for Education announced a £9 million investment in the programme, with a further £8 million announced for next academic year. Read more on the University of Oxford’s Arts Blog.
Charles’ publications include a number of assessment materials including the Phonological Abilities Test (1997), the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC, 2009) and Sound Linkage (2014) as well as several books dealing with various aspects of reading development. He is the former Editor-in –Chief of the journal ‘Scientific Studies of Reading’ (2007-2009) and a former Senior Editor of the Association of Psychological Science’s flagship journal, Psychological Science (2012-2019).
In 2009 he published “Developmental disorders of language, learning and cognition” (Wiley-Blackwell; co-authored with Maggie Snowling). He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo (2014) and is a member of Academia Europea and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He received the Feitelson Research Award from the International Reading Association (1998) and the Marion Welchman International Award for Contributions to the study of Dyslexia from the British Dyslexia Association (2016). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Fellow of Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the British Academy
Charles Hulme would welcome informal contacts from prospective doctoral students interested in the following topics:
- Developmental dyslexia
- Reading comprehension impairment
- The development of arithmetic skills
- Reading and language intervention
Research interests
- Developmental cognitive disorders
- Development of reading, language and arithmetic skills in children
- Randomized controlled trials in education
