Dr. Che Kan Leong Receives Earned Doctor of Letters

Posted May 19, 1998


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - May 19, 1998
98-05-15-OTHER

Education professor to receive Earned Doctor of
Letters

The U of S will award an Earned Doctor of Letters to Dr. Che Kan
Leong, a professor in the Department for the Education of Exceptional
Children, College of Education at its spring convocation on May 21,
1998.

Dr. Che Kan Leong has been on the U of S faculty since 1969. At
various times, he has also been a visiting scholar to psychology
departments of the Free University of Amsterdam, London University
Birkbeck College, University of Ume嬠Nagoya University, Hiroshima
University, the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of
Hong Kong, and East China Normal University, Shanghai.

Dr. Leong first trained as a teacher in his native Hong Kong and
worked there as a teacher, college lecturer, and researcher from the
1950s to 1969.

He earned his BA (Hons.) degree in English literature (1957) and his
MA (Ed.) degree (1964) from the University of Hong Kong; a
Postgraduate Diploma in Child Guidance and Development (1960) at
the Schonell Centre, University of Queensland, Australia, on a
UNESCO Fellowship; and his PhD in educational psychology and
special education at the University of Alberta in 1974, with a
dissertation on information processing of children with dyslexia. This
work won him the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the
International Reading Association.

He teaches senior undergraduate and graduate courses on language
and learning disabilities. His cumulative studies on psychological
processes of reading and its difficulties, metalinguistic awareness,
lexical access of English and Chinese, and the application of text-to-
speech computer systems to enhance reading comprehension testify
to his multi-disciplinary and cross-linguistic approaches.

Professor Ingvar Lundberg, University of G?urg (Gothenburg) and
a noted reading researcher, summarizes Leong's scientific
contribution in terms of his accumulation of "insights and development
of more precise and clear theoretical concepts which have been
subjected to rigorous empirical tests in a long, coherent sequence of
brilliant investigations."

Dr. Leong's publications include two authored and five co-edited
graduate-level volumes on reading processes: Psychology of
Reading (1982), Children with Specific Reading Disabilities (1987),
Developmental and Acquired Dyslexia (1995), Cross-Language
Studies of Learning to Read and Spell (1997), among others.

He has published some 40 book chapters and 40 research papers
over the last 15 years or so, and he's currently completing a co-edited
monograph on the cognitive processing of Chinese and Japanese
languages.

For his outstanding contribution to the science of dyslexia, the
International Dyslexia Association honored Leong with the Samuel T.
Orton Award, in 1986. In 1990, the University of Umeå £onferred on
him the Doctor of Social Sciences (Honoris Causa) degree. And in
May, 1995, he won the Distinguished Researcher Award from the
University of Saskatchewan. He is a Fellow of the American and
Canadian Psychological Associations, the American Psychological
Society, the International Academy for Research in Learning
Disabilities, and a Chartered Psychologist (UK).

For more information, please contact:

Che Kan Leong
Department for the Education of Exceptional Children
College of Education
(306) 966-5257