Dr Pauline Cogan will focus on the prime importance of good language ability in the student and the effects that language deficit can have on learning. 

The presentation will also focus on phonology and phonological awareness development as an understanding of the sounds of language, which takes it beyond meaning. 

The various kinds of  memory will also be presented and the crucial nature of Short Term Memory, Working Memory, Long Term Memory for language, and Associative Long Term Memory will also be discussed.

Interventions for all three segments of the presentation will be recommended.

Dr Pauline Cogan is a former Irish Primary (Elementary) School Teacher who has had a life-long interest in literacy and literacy acquisition difficulties. She has taught, lectured and pursued studies in various parts of the world in education, special education, linguistics, psychology and neurology. She holds an M Sc in Neurology and Linguistics from VUB,Brussels and a Ph D, in Psychology through Science, from Trinity College Dublin.Pauline has developed TEST2r which is an early screening, diagnostic and intervention tool and is intended for use by primary school teachers and resource teachers to help them identify and provide interventions to those children who may be at risk of literacy acquisition difficulties (5 & 6 year olds). The original test kit has already been developed on data from 1041 children nationally and the results are very exciting. The final version of the test was administered to 116 to establish its robustness. The results were so striking that a decision was made to gather national norms based on the test battery. Norms have now been gathered and TEST2r will be launched by the Minister for Education, Mr Richard Bruton, on the 16th June 2017.