Abstract
The teaching of literacy is fraught with mythology, opinion and the taking of polarised positions. The term ‘Great Debate’ was coined by Chall thirty years ago: is the discussion now finally over? The place of the respective roles of ‘meaning’ and ‘code-breaking’ strategies are seen by various theorists as having different emphases in the child’s competence as it develops. That models of the reading process differ and are partisan is hardly surprising. Two dominant models directly oppose each other. The ‘bottom-up’ theories propose a sub-skills approach suggesting that reading is learned initially by manipulating the smallest units of language, i.e. letters, words. The reverse position supported by theories commonly referred to as ‘top-down’ suggests that the search for meaning is central from the outset and that the main strategies for decoding words are prediction and guessing (Goodman, 1976; Goodman and Goodman, 1979; Smith, 1971, 1973). The effect that this disagreement has had on both methods of teaching reading and the standards of literacy is becoming clear.
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Riley, J. (1999). The Reading Debate …. In: Nunes, T. (eds) Learning to Read: An Integrated View from Research and Practice. Neuropsychology and Cognition, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4826-9_13
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