Contemporary Perspectives on Reading and Spelling

With contributions from leading international researchers, Contemporary Perspectives on Reading and Spelling offers a critique of current thinking on the research literature into reading, reading comprehension and writing. Each paper in this volume provides an account of empirical research that challenges aspects of accepted models and widely accepted theories about reading and spelling.
This book develops the argument for a need to incorporate less widely cited research into popular accounts of written language development and disability, challenging the idea that the development of a universal theory of written language development is attainable. The arguments within the book are explored in three parts:


overarching debates in reading and spelling
reading and spelling across languages
written language difficulties and approaches to teaching.
Opening up the existing debates, and incorporating psychological theory and the politics surrounding the teaching and learning of reading and spelling, this edited collection offers some challenging points for reflection about how the discipline of psychology as a whole approaches the study of written language skills.
Highlighting ground-breaking new perspectives, this book forms essential reading for all researchers and practitioners with a focus on the development of reading and spelling skills.

Clare Wood is Reader in Developmental Psychology at Coventry University, UK.
Vince Connelly is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK.

Introduction: Contemporary Perspectives on Reading and Spelling Clare Wood & Vincent Connelly Part 1: Overarching Debates in Reading and Spelling 1. Phonological Awareness: Beyond Phonemes Clare Wood, Lesly Wade-Woolley & Andrew Holliman 2. Auditory Processing and Developmental Dyslexia: Throwing the Baby out with the bath water Jennifer Thomson 3. Acquiring Complex Reading Skills: An Exploration of Disyllabic Word Reading Lynne G. Duncan 4. Children’s reading comprehension difficulties: a consideration of the precursors and consequences Kate Cain 5. The Acquisition of Spelling Patterns: Early, Late or Never? Nenagh Kemp 6. Viewing spelling in a cognitive context: Underlying representations and processes Sarah Critten & Karen Pine 7. What Spelling Errors Have to Tell About Vocabulary Learning Ruth H. Bahr, Elaine R. Silliman, & Virginia Berninger Part 2: Reading and Spelling Across Languages 8. Reading and Spelling in transparent alphabetic orthographies: Points of convergence and divergence Selma Babayigit 9. How do children and adults conceptualise phoneme-letter relationships? Annukka Lehtonen 10. Do Bilingual Beginning Readers Activate the Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences of their Two Languages when Reading in One Language? Vincent Goetry, Regine Kolinsky & Philippe Mousty 11. Using Spelling Knowledge in a Word Game Morag MacLean 12. Metalinguistic and subcharacter skills in Chinese literacy acquisition Xiuli Tong, Phil D Liu & Catherine McBride-Chang Part 3: Written Language Difficulties and Approaches to Teaching 13. Enhancing word reading, spelling and reading comprehension skills with synthetic phonics teaching: studies in Scotland and England Rhona Johnson, Joyce E, Watson & Sarah Logan 14. Does reading instruction have an influence on how readers process print? Vince Connelly, G. Brian Thompson, Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn & Michael F. McKay 15. The cerebellar deficit theory of developmental dyslexia: Evidence and implications for intervention? Shahrzad Irannejad & Rob Savage 16. Teaching Children with Severe Learning Difficulties: Routes to Word Recognition Using Logographic Symbols Kieron Sheehy and Andrew J. Holliman