ABSTRACT
English (and particularly the teaching of literacy) seems to many to be a worry, the most prominent unlanced boil on the flanks of education, for ever causing concern. This is not for lack of offers of medication. Barely a day goes by without politicians, the Chief Inspector, or Melanie Phillips in The Observer offering healing counsel, despite the lack of any incontrovertible evidence that standards of literacy have declined, and no evidence at all that, if they have, teaching methods are implicated. English teacher educators, like their maths colleagues, have the privilege of their own copious National Curriculum for Initial Teacher ‘Training’ (1997) from the TTA and OFSTED, astonishingly explicit about the knowledge and skills which children need to become literate, presumably because its authors were fearful that ‘trendy educationalists’ would eschew any teaching of literacy skills at all.
