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

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作为澳大利亚学习困难杂志的新任编辑，我虚心感谢温迪·摩尔博士近年来的领导能力以及她将接力棒交给我的不知疲倦的耐心。我还要感谢澳大利亚学习困难委员会的成员，感谢他们任命我为该杂志的编辑，我相信该杂志具有影响多学科受众的巨大能力。最终，这个广泛的镜头最能满足有学习困难的个人的需求。本期刊载了三篇文章，包括 2017 年澳大利亚学习困难杰出研究奖获得者 Anne Castles 教授及其合著者的实证研究；来自认知科学系的 Vince Polito、Stephen Pritchard 和Thushara Anandakumar 博士，麦考瑞大学 [澳大利亚悉尼] ARC 认知及其障碍卓越中心和她的同事调查了 64 名在校三年级儿童的单一非单词阅读。根据之前的测试，这些孩子被分为强读者和弱读者。作者发现，与弱读者相比，强读者在阅读非单词时犯的错误更少，而且，强读者犯的错误更有可能是另一个在表达上相似的非单词。相比之下，弱读者犯的错误更有可能是非单词的词汇化。Castles 等人得出的结论是，他们的研究结果支持这样一种观点，即强大的读者继续利用他们的字素-音素对应知识来处理单词，这与其他一些作者所持的立场形成对比，即通过应用字素-音素知识会损害有能力的读者。Castles 和她的同事还提倡使用非单词测试作为深入了解语音解码的有效手段。Peter Westwood 的文章全面讨论了最近关于拼写的研究；考虑到发达国家对拼写能力标准下降的担忧，这是一篇及时的文章。你们中的许多人可能已经阅读过 Westwood 之前关于拼写和拼写指导的著作，正如他所说，这些著作通常比阅读更受关注。本文首先简要概述了关于我们如何学习拼写的关键理论，然后他将附带学习和显式教学描述为学校中与拼写相关的两种主要方法。接下来，Westwood 介绍了最近关于拼写和/或与拼写相关的研究中提出的一些反复出现的问题。例如，他指出，短信可能对拼写知识产生的日益增长的恐惧实际上并不过分。他还提出了一项研究，强调向学生教授单词及其内部单位的重要性；尤其是语素，作为让学生掌握有关如何拼写的基本知识的重要组成部分。与 Castles 等人一起，这两篇文章持续支持显式教学的价值，其中包括对字素的详细关注，音素和澳大利亚学习困难杂志 2018，VOL。23，没有。2, 105–106 https://doi.org/10.1080/19404158.2018.1556012