ABSTRACT
Literacy embraces the skills of reading and writing. A useful definition, by Gibson and Levin (1975), is that ‘reading is extracting information from text’ (p. 5). These authors also emphasise that reading is an active process, self-directed by the reader for many purposes and in a number of different ways. An early reader decoding words from letter sounds is functioning very differently from a mature reader who is able to use rapid word recognition and sophisticated prediction and search strategies. Goodman (1968) describes reading as essentially a linguistic process of communication, and points out that in reading we are moving from something that is unknown (marks on paper) to something that is known (our own language).
