The development of reading

教授阅读技能，帮助学习阅读有困难的儿童是我们社会的挑战之一。没有培养阅读技能的人可能会经历社会和情感问题，永远不能充分发挥他们的潜力。这项研究计划将研究儿童和青少年阅读和拼写技能的发展。我们将对幼儿在第一次学习阅读时阅读能力的发展进行详细研究，并确定哪些任务可以预测那些以后会有阅读困难的人。我们还将研究他们作为阅读材料所需的技能如何变得更加困难和技术性。尽管加拿大的城市有许多移民和儿童在上学，他们正在学习用英语或法语阅读，这两种语言都不是他们在家里学到的。学习阅读对这些孩子构成了特殊的挑战。我们将对这些孩子的语言发展以及他们如何在这种情况下学习阅读技能进行研究。我们还将研究他们第一语言的阅读和语言技能，以确定这些技能如何影响他们的英语发展。我们之前的一些研究表明，如果他们得到了良好的指导，许多以英语为第二语言的儿童实际上会发展出出色的阅读和拼写技能。我们将研究最有利于这些儿童的教学类型。这些研究将帮助我们了解成绩正常的儿童和阅读和拼写困难的儿童的阅读和拼写技能的发展情况。

Teaching reading skills and helping children who have difficulty learning to read is one of the challenges of our society.  Individuals who fail to develop reading skills may experience social and emotional problems and never reach their full potential. This research program will study the development of reading and spelling skills in children and adolescents.  We will conduct detailed studies of how reading develops in young children when they first learn to read and determine which tasks predict those who will have reading difficulties later on.  We will also study how the skills that they need as the material that they are reading becomes more difficult and technical.  The cities of Canada have many immigrants and children who attend school and who are learning to read in either English or French, neither of which is the language that they have learned at home.  Learning to read poses special challenges to these children.  We will conduct studies of the language development of these children and how they learn reading skills in this situation.  We will also study their reading and language skills in their first language to determine how these skills influence their development in English.  Some of our previous research indicated that many children with English as a second language actually develop excellent reading and spelling skills if they have had good instruction. We will study the types of instruction that are most beneficial to these children.These studies will help us understand the development of reading and spelling skills in children with normal levels of achievement and children who are experiencing difficulties with reading and spelling.