Editorial: Frontiers in the acquisition of literacy

Citation: Fletcher-Flinn CM (2015) Editorial: Frontiers in the acquisition of literacy. Reading and writing are fundamental to full participation in our societies, yet how children acquire such a large system of interconnected representations of print words, their meanings, and phonology in the brain remains unclear. As the teaching of literacy takes up a large proportion of classroom time in the early years, increasing knowledge about children's learning processes should result in better approaches to the teaching of reading and spelling. These insights would be particularly useful from a clinical perspective for the treatment of developmental disabilities, such as dyslexia and dysgraphia. Important questions need to be addressed, and given the many different influences and overlapping processes on literacy learning, the answers are not straightforward. What are the learning processes? Are they the same across different orthographies, or do different orthographies require different skills and learning processes? What is the relationship between reading and spelling? How do they interact and augment each other? What is the effect of different teaching approaches on children's emerging reading system? Do early reading comprehension problems disappear over time? What are the predictors of children's reading attainment? This E-Book responds to some of these general questions in the form of original research and opinion articles. Taken together the articles contribute new perspectives and challenges to current reading acquisition theories, and present new research on early reading skills, reading instruction, and spelling. Thompson (2014a) claims that most reading acquisition theories are limited by their specification of letter-sound requirements to a particular class of teaching approaches. Acknowledging such limitations is an important step in the development of reading acquisition theories that are potentially more useful. Fletcher-Flinn (2014) merges ideas from dynamic systems theory with developmental data from a precocious reader. Reference is made to Knowledge Systems theory, which offers a more varied range of theoretical applicability. Share (2014) asserts that there is a general belief in the superiority of alphabetic writing systems that has hindered progress in the development of a universal model of learning to read. Some counterevidence is presented, and in the context of a more general question on " optimality, " Share proposes a universal model of reading based on a broader novice-to-expert dualism. Nag (2014) maintains that specification of the learning mechanisms involved in reading akshara units, the symbols used in many writing systems (alphasyllabaries) of Southern Asia, present a challenge to alphabet-based theories …