Introduction: Teaching Literacy: What Practices, When and Why?

Abstract

In western societies nowadays everyone is supposed to be able to read. Therefore many of the characteristic features of reading are so familiar and seem so natural that they have become invisible. Almost all the researchers who have been working on reading and on the way children learn to read (or not) live in countries which mass-produce books and newspapers and where one resorts to writing and reading in nearly every social activity; all children in these countries go to school for more and less prolonged periods in their lives and the teaching profession is nurtured on long pedagogical traditions (textbooks, regular progression, exercises and debates on methods). These characteristics make up a spontaneous reference framework for researchers: all of them acknowledge that a child should normally be able to read at the age of about seven or eight; that “normal” reading is visual and silent—one reads on one’s own, at one’s own pace; that reading consists in processing the information contained in a text from a language point of view (writing codes) and knowledge (written contents); and that the reading medium informs readers at once about the content and form of a text (whether he opens a dictionary, a novel, a newspaper or a letter). Thus research on reading (carried out in laboratory experiments, data from school curricula, national or international assessment tests, surveys on populations of good or bad adult or child readers) confirms the features which characterises reading as it is commonly practised in societies offering regular schooling at the end of the 20th century.