Editorial: New directions in research on reading and writing difficulties

It has long been a puzzle that some children seem to learn to read and write no matter what the instructional method, whether it is implicit learning such as the book experience approach in whole language or whether it is explicit learning through the phonological approach. At the same time, it is well known that many children fail to read and write. Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) reviewed research on why some learn while others fail and concluded that literacy difficulties happen when beginner readers use the wrong strategy. Most first words are learned not through phonics but by memorization, selective association with a cue in the word that is remembered, such as the “tail” on “dog”. This is the way words are learned in other languages such as Chinese, but it puts a heavy load on memory and makes the learning process very slow. Not only this, children start school knowing perhaps 10,000 spoken words, and they will see many of these in print in their first years of school – and see them for the first time. The majority of children figure out a better way to learn to read and write than by memorizing words – instead, they crack the code, realizing that letters represent phonemes in the words they speak. They understand that print is speech written down. This insight however is not enough in that the letter-sound correspondence rules of English are really complex, and it takes years for children to become fluent just in decoding the words on the page. Gough (1996) called these letter-sound rules the “cipher”. Students without the cipher read and spell very differently. Children who know the cipher are better able to read nonwords and spell real words than those without the cipher. Their spelling is more phonetic; their reading errors have more graphic similarity. Their errors are very different to the students with difficulties whose errors are not anywhere near as close to the actual words. How do we teach the cipher? In the whole language approach, the aim is for children to use three cueing systems – semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic – and that these cueing systems are best accessed through reading of text, which is the basis of the book reading approach. In this approach, graphophonic cues are seen as of minor importance, so that the student only needs to look at the first one or two letters and can then guess the word they want to read. This approach relies very much on children being able to use their language knowledge to predict what the word must be using very few letter clues. The problem is that context is a fickle friend. It is there when you do not need it; not there when you do need it (Gough, 1996). Context clues enable us to predict with accuracy only when the word is highly predictable, at the end of a sentence, and with a lot of context help behind it. In real text reading, context clues only help us to predict one in ten content words and this is not enough (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011). Phonics, however, directly teaches rules that will help the child to read and spell. Explicit teaching of phonics is the missing ingredient in whole language approaches to reading instruction. Once the student has some knowledge of the cipher they can build on this through further reading until the cipher is installed. This is not all there is to reading. The simple view of reading says that the cipher (or decoding ability) is crucial for learning to read and spell words; the other part of the puzzle is language understanding which is crucial for comprehension. Those who have difficulties with reading and writing may be weak in one of these two areas or both. We need both to become effective readers and writers. This is the theory, anyway. How can we test whether it is correct? The six studies in this special issue