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 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF LEARNING DIFFICULTIES 2018, VOL. 23, NO. 2, 105–106 https://doi.org/10.1080/19404158.2018.1556012