The state of reading research in the United Kingdom

Abstract

I have been asked to write this editorial because I have been responsible for two ventures in reading research related to monitoring and disseminating information about the range and the scope of such research. The first is the establishment of the British Register of Reading Research and the second the annual Review of Reading Research. The Register was an attempt to find out the topics and areas being researched for the purpose of higher degrees in Universities and Polytechnics, since I 970. It was first published in I 976 as a result of funding which was part of a grant made by the DES to the School of Education, University of Reading for the period 1974-77, later extended to I 980. The annual Review is a self-inflicted task, of increasing proportions as more academic jounrals appear and reading is mentioned in areas such as educational sociology, socio-linguistics, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, etc. I monitor between thirty and forty British academic journals, distinguishing between research and general interest articles and books when I come to write the review and list the annotated articles. The following impressions therefore are based on these experiences and are not the result ofany quantitative study ofthe information from these two sources of information.Over the last decade "reading" has been described increasingly in broader terms, with emphasis on reading as a meaning making process. The process is now more and more being seen as complex, and involving much more than mere verbal performance. More attention has focussed on both the cognitive and affective factors and "reading" is seen as a developmental process, although there still seems to be controversy centring round the early acquisition stage; do we start with letter recognition and build up to the higher order skills or do we begin with meaning and 'map' such meaning, using our knowledge of the 'rules' of verbal language and our inferences from experimental knowledge, onto written language?The often acrimonius arguments over the existence and nature ofdyslexia seem to be giving way to small-scale studies of a comparative nature, which are providing evidence of what the dyslexic, compared with the normal reader, finds difficult about the learning to read process. Increasingly the dyslexic is seen as having a deficiency in information-processing, especially in naming or labelling (Ellis and Miles, 1978) and in memory information storage and capacity (Thomson and Wilsher, 1978), which seems to affect visual and auditory sequencing. Vision and eye movements have, after a period of nearly forty years, once again appeared in the literature as topics of investigation. Previous research mainly concentrated on static vision, and the development now seems to be based on the realisation that dynamic viewing and ocular control may be more important factors in learning to read than individuals' irregularities in distance sight-the latter being the type of vision usually tested in schools. (Bedwell et al, 1978; Moseley, 1978). Guest lcditorialThe eye...