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

中文翻译：

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社论：读写困难研究的新方向

长期以来，一些孩子似乎无论采用何种教学方法，无论是全语言的书籍体验法等内隐学习，还是通过语音法进行的外显学习，似乎都在学习阅读和写作，这一直是一个难题。与此同时，众所周知，许多孩子不会读写。Tunmer 和 Nicholson（2011）回顾了为什么有些人学习而有些人失败的研究，并得出结论，当初学者使用错误的策略时，读写困难就会发生。大多数第一个单词不是通过语音学习，而是通过记忆，选择性地与记住的单词中的提示关联，例如“狗”上的“尾巴”。这是其他语言（如中文）的单词学习方式，但它会给记忆带来沉重的负担，并且使学习过程非常缓慢。不仅如此，孩子们开始上学时可能会知道 10,000 个口语单词，他们会在上学的第一年看到其中许多印刷品——并且是第一次看到它们。大多数孩子找到了比记住单词更好的学习读写的方法——相反，他们破解了密码，意识到字母代表他们说的话中的音素。他们明白印刷是写下来的演讲。然而，这种洞察力还不够，因为英语的字母-声音对应规则非常复杂，孩子们需要数年才能流利地解码页面上的单词。Gough (1996) 将这些字母发音规则称为“密码”。没有密码的学生阅读和拼写非常不同。知道密码的孩子比没有密码的孩子能够更好地阅读非单词和拼写真实的单词。他们的拼写更拼音；他们的阅读错误有更多的图形相似性。他们的错误与有困难的学生非常不同，他们的错误与实际单词不接近。我们如何教密码？在整个语言方法中，目标是让孩子们使用三种提示系统——语义、句法和图形语音——并且最好通过阅读文本来访问这些提示系统，这是书籍阅读方法的基础。在这种方法中，文字提示被认为是次要的，因此学生只需要看前一个或两个字母，然后就可以猜出他们想要阅读的单词。这种方法在很大程度上依赖于儿童能够使用他们的语言知识来预测单词必须是什么，使用很少的字母线索。问题是上下文是一个善变的朋友。当您不需要它时，它就在那里；当你需要它时不在那里（Gough，1996）。只有当单词高度可预测时，在句子末尾，并且背后有很多上下文帮助时，上下文线索才能使我们准确地进行预测。在真正的文本阅读中，上下文线索只能帮助我们预测十分之一的内容词，这还不够（Tunmer & Nicholson，2011）。然而，Phonics 直接教授有助于孩子阅读和拼写的规则。语音的显式教学是整个语言阅读教学方法中缺失的组成部分。一旦学生对密码有了一些了解，他们就可以通过进一步阅读来构建此密码，直到安装密码。这不是阅读的全部内容。阅读的简单观点认为密码（或解码能力）对于学习阅读和拼写单词至关重要；谜题的另一部分是语言理解，这对理解至关重要。那些在阅读和写作方面有困难的人可能在这两个领域中的一个或两个方面都很薄弱。我们需要同时成为有效的读者和作者。无论如何，这是理论。我们如何测试它是否正确？本期特刊的六项研究 我们如何测试它是否正确？本期特刊的六项研究 我们如何测试它是否正确？本期特刊的六项研究