ABSTRACT

Nowhere was the general complexity and confusion over curriculum more clearly seen than in the disagreement over the teaching of reading and language development among urban children. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in Britain, the US and Australia, there was continuous controversy about reported static or declining reading achievement. Surveys by Morris in 1964 or ILEA in 1968 showed that one in six of 8-year-olds fell into the category of non-readers, and just as with patterns of examination success, proportionately too many of these children attended urban schools. 1 Many children needed infant methods of teaching reading at the junior stage or even beyond, yet few junior teachers and virtually no secondary teachers were adequately trained to teach children to read. Experts differed over the trend in reading standards when comparing tests from different decades. Many disagreed with the NFER investigators, Start and Wells, who in 1972 concluded that reading standards had declined. 2 But everyone agreed that reading standards were static at a time when advanced technological societies, according to UNESCO, needed ever higher levels of functional literacy.