In 2019, she received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award[4] from the Society for Text and Discourse in 2019 in recognition of her decades-long research program on children's reading difficulties.
[2] She became a primary school teacher for two years where her experiences working with young readers sparked an interest in children’s reading comprehension problems.
"[8] Oakhill returned to the University of Sussex to pursue a PhD in the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, which was headed by Stuart Sutherland.
[11] After joining the faculty of the University of Sussex as a lecturer in 1990, Oakhill's primary research focus shifted back to reading comprehension and how children draw inferences while processing text.
Second, teachers should ask children what they don't understand in order to encourage metacognition and develop their comprehension monitoring skills.
Oakhill argues that it is inefficient to force memorization, and that reading comprehension is enhanced through oral discussions in which ideas are questioned and debated.