The politics of the teaching of reading

Historically, political debates have broken out over how to teach reading in primary schools and infant classrooms. These debates and “reading wars” have often resulted from public concerns and media reportage of a fall in reading standards. They also reflect the importance placed on learning to read by parents, teachers, employers, and politicians. Public and media-driven controversies over the teaching of reading have resulted in intense public and professional debates over which specific methods and materials to use with beginning readers and with children who have reading difficulties. Recently, such debates have led to a renewed emphasis on reading proficiency and “standardized” approaches to teaching reading and engaging with literacy. The universal acceptance of the importance of learning to read has also led to vested interests in specific methods, reading programmes, and early literacy assessments amongst professional, business, commercial, and parental lobbying groups. This article traces these debates and the resulting growing support for a quantitative reductionist approach to early-reading programmes

Understanding unintentional plagiarism and international students’ approaches to academic reading: a participatory approach to researching the international student experience

This project aimed to investigate international student approaches to reading and source-use in preparation for a written assignment as part of a commitment to identifying the learning needs of students undertaking independent learning tasks outside of the university classroom. To date, student literacies and plagiarism avoidance support have focused almost exclusively on writing practices and authorial identity. This study, therefore, sought to explore student approaches to reading as the basis for developing recommendations for the better support of all students engaging in researching and reading for assessment. The project also sought to pilot a collaborative approach to the scholarship of learning and teaching by engaging students as co-researchers in the data collection, analysis and dissemination of the project outcomes

Different Ways of Reading, or Just Making the Right Noises?

What does reading look like? Can learning to read be reduced to the acquisition of a set of isolable skills, or proficiency in reading be equated with the independence of the solitary, silent reader of prose fiction? These conceptions of reading and reading development, which figure strongly in educational policy, may appear to be simple common sense. But both ethnographic data and evidence from literary texts suggest that such paradigms offer, at most, a partial and ahistorical picture of reading. An important dimension, neglected in the dominant paradigms, is the irreducibly social quality of reading practices

Context and repetition in word learning

Young children learn words from a variety of situations, including shared storybook reading. A recent study by Horst et al. (2011a) demonstrates that children learned more new words during shared storybook reading if they were read the same stories repeatedly than if they were read different stories that had the same number of target words. The current paper reviews this study and further examines the effect of contextual repetition on children's word learning in both shared storybook reading and other situations, including fast mapping by mutual exclusivity. The studies reviewed here suggest that the same cognitive mechanisms support word learning in a variety of situations. Both practical considerations for experimental design and directions for future research are discussed

Vision and Reading Difficulties Part 1: Specific learning difficulties and vision

This article is the first in a series of five about vision and reading difficulties, and provides an introduction and an overview of learning disabilities and specific learning difficulties. It outlines the role of the optometrist in helping people with such problems; it describes the symptoms that optometrists should look for and it provides an introduction of the evidence-based approach. The second article in this series will cover the optometric and orthoptic correlates of reading difficulties. Articles three and four will describe the use of coloured filters, including background, techniques, evidence, and mechanism. The final article will draw together the themes in the series of articles and discuss the clinical protocol and the role of the eye care practitioner in managing visual factors associated with reading difficulties