Editorial

As the incoming editor of the Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, I humbly thank Dr Wendy Moore for her leadership over recent years and for her tireless patience handing the baton over to me. I also gratefully acknowledge members of the Board of Learning Difficulties Australia for their faith in appointing me as editor of this journal which I believe has great capacity to reach a multidisciplinary audience. Ultimately, this broad lens best serves the needs of individuals with learning difficulties. Three articles are presented in this current issue including an empirical study from the 2017 Learning Difficulties Australia’s Eminent Researcher Award recipient, Professor Anne Castles, along with her co-authors; Drs Vince Polito, Stephen Pritchard and Thushara Anandakumar, all from the Department of Cognitive Science, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University [Sydney, Australia]

Castles and her colleagues investigated single nonword reading among 64 children who were in their third year of school. These children were divided into strong and weak readers based in previous testing. The authors found that the strong readers made fewer errors reading nonwords compared to the weak readers and further, errors made by the strong readers were more likely to be another nonword that was similar in its presentation. In contrast, errors made by weak readers were far more likely to be a lexicalization of the nonword. Castles et al., conclude that their findings lend weight to the view that strong readers continue to employ their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences to tackle words, which stands in contrast to the position held by some other authors that able readers are compromised by applying grapheme-phoneme knowledge. Castles and her colleagues also advocate for the use of nonword testing as a valid means of providing a deep insights into phonological decoding.

Peter Westwood’s article comprehensively discusses recent research on spelling; a timely piece given concerns around the developed world about falling standards of spelling ability. Many of you likely to have read previous work by Westwood on spelling and spelling instruction, which, as he argues, often attracts less attention than reading. This current article starts with a succinct overview of key theories about how we learn to spell and he then describes incidental learning and explicit instruction as the two main approaches operating in schools in relation to spelling. Following on, Westwood covers some recurring issues raised in recent research about and/or related to spelling. For example, he notes that the rising fear that texting may have on spelling knowledge may in fact not be overly warranted. He also presents research that emphasizes the importance of teaching students about words and their internal units; particularly morphemes, as an essential component of equipping students with essential knowledge about how to spell. Together with Castles et al., these two articles lend ongoing support for the value of explicit teaching that includes detailed attention to graphemes, phonemes and other intra-word elements; ultimately to provide students with the agency to tackle increasingly demanding reading and spelling tasks.

Livingston, Siegel and Ribary’s article is a thematic review of over 100 papers reporting on negative psychosocial consequences on self, family and society in relation to individuals with Developmental Dyslexia. Spanning nearly 40 years, their review highlights that individuals with Developmental Dyslexia are heterogeneous in terms of their emotional and mental health challenges. While Livingston et al., emphasize the critical need for early and high quality intervention for the learning difficulty itself, findings from their thematic review point to the importance of a multi-pronged, person and family-centered intervention model that for example, addresses the psychological health and sense of self-worth of the affected individual and his/her family and further, offers intervention to the individual targeting executive functioning such as planning, organizing and self-monitoring.

These three articles reflect the diverse lens that we all need to adopt to comprehensively serve the needs of children, adolescents and adults who have learning difficulties. Happy reading, or if you are like me, happy highlighting.