LDA Bulletin

The central theme of this issue is comprehension – one of the basic dimensions of the Simple View of Reading. We all know intuitively what it feels like to understand (or not understand, or only partly understand) something that we read or hear, but the concept of ‘comprehension’ is difficult to define objectively, and it becomes even more elusive when we try to assess it. Comprehension presents teachers with huge challenges in the classroom. It is not only difficult to know when a student is not understanding and why they are not understanding, but also a challenge to know what to do to help. Supporting comprehension, however, is one of the most important things a teacher can do.

The theme of this issue of the Bulletin is Thinking about Learning. Stanislas Dehaene characterises human beings as not merely homo sapiens, the thinking species, but also homo docens – the species that teaches itself (Dehaene, 2020). The contributors to this LDA Bulletin invite readers to think about homo docens in the context of the classroom, and have addressed the topic from the point of view of both students and teachers. We are invited to think about how students learn, and also to think about how teachers can learn about best practice for teaching.

The theme of this issue of the LDA Bulletin is ‘Learning struggles and resilience’. Our contributors include experienced academics, including several members of very active research teams in Australia, as well as teachers and school administrators who are writing from the chalk face. We thank all our contributors sincerely for their efforts to try to help us to ‘climb inside the skin’ of all children as they learn to read and write. Taking this point of view can not only help us to ‘get along better’ with students and support their resilience – it can hopefully also help us to teach better. Our keynote author, James Chapman, sets the tone for this issue. He has researched the issue of self-concept for many years, and he presents a meticulously documented case that explains why learning to read is about the ‘mind’ as well as about the ‘words’. He points out that students’ sense of themselves as strong or weak readers develops very early indeed. He also explains how important it is to provide young children with strategies for reading that allow them to feel that they are in control rather than just guessing, and to believe that their techniques for identifying words actually work.

This issue of the LDA Bulletin has reading fluency as its primary focus, with a keynote submission from Dr Jan Hasbrouck. In the Special Issue on Fluency section, Dr Jan Hasbrouck explains the concept of reading fluency and dispels some common misconceptions about the topic. Dr Tom Nicholson discusses evidence related to the efficacy of fluency intervention, and Emeritus Professor Kevin and Dr Robyn Wheldall give important insights into the development of their own reading fluency test, the WARP. Accurate word recognition is, of course the prerequisite for developing reading fluency, and Dr Toni Seiler and Dr Suze Leitão provide evidence about an intervention strategy they have documented that supports the development of word recognition skills. Dr Elizabeth Norton provides an intriguing focus on research into Rapid Automatized Naming, the assessment of which can act as a warning light for processing problems that are associated with difficulties with reading fluency. Dr Ros Neilson follows up with a speech-language pathologist’s experience of RAN.