UKLA is pleased to announce the JRiR and Literacy winners of the prestigious UKLA/ Wiley Research in Literacy Education Award 2026
The Award is given annually for papers judged to be exemplary in terms of the criteria applied. The Awards Committee congratulates the shortlisted authors for this year’s Wiley Prizes.
Journal for Research in Reading
The winner of the Award was:
The contributions of individual oral language skills to kindergarten students’ reading comprehension (Jamie L. Metsala, Erin Sparks, Margaret D. David) 48 (4)
The Awards panel commented:
In this paper, the authors address a foundational issue: without understanding how reading comprehension begins, our theoretical models remain incomplete. The study also fills a real gap, focusing on which specific oral language skills uniquely support comprehension in kindergarten. The authors connect research to classroom practice by testing an under-examined question: what teacher-assessed reading levels actually draw on in terms of word reading and oral language skills, despite the fact that reading levels are often used to select students for interventions. Their reasoning about why levelled texts might behave differently is convincing, and the paper follows the evidence even when findings are surprising. Most importantly, the result that syntactic awareness is the only unique oral-language predictor of teacher-assessed reading levels is both theoretically provocative—challenging models that restrict metalinguistic effects to decoding or listening comprehension—and practically useful, pointing to instruction that strengthens children’s ability to analyse sentence structure and monitor meaning.
Literacy
The winner of the Award was:
Young bilingual students’ use of metacognitive strategies to overcome comprehension difficulties when reading in the foreign language (Oihana Leonet , Elizabet Arocena and Eider Saragueta) 59 (2)
The Awards panel commented:
The authors tackle a timely issue in increasingly multilingual school systems and, importantly, zoom in on the performance phase of reading—where students actually deploy strategies and monitor comprehension. The audio-recorded peer reading activities provide concrete, “in-action” evidence of students’ strategic behaviour, including planning, selective attention, monitoring (self-correction, self-questioning), and cognitive moves such as translation, retelling, and asking clarification questions. This makes the paper valuable for researchers and educators who want to understand what comprehension work looks like in multilingual classrooms. The detailed analysis of students’ work makes key elements of the comprehension process transparent, and draws attention to cognitive strategies, thus making an important contribution to the wider research base on translanguaging within the classroom.
The winners were chosen by the Wiley Award Panel:
Literacy: Fiona Maine, Danielle Dennis, Sabine Little, Frances Bodger, Mia Perry, and Jordi Castelyn.
JRiR: Fiona Maine, Danielle Dennis, Jonathan Solity, Sarah McGeown, Jordi Casteleyn
The panel would like to congratulate all the authors who were nominated for the award, and Wiley for their continued generosity in supporting this award.