ABSTRACT
Introduction It is now more than 30 years since Don Holdaway published The Foundations of Literacy (1979), which introduced the idea of shared reading to thousands of teachers. Drawing on what was then new research about literacy learning before school, especially Clay (1972) and Clark (1976), Holdaway proposed a pedagogy that attempted to replicate some of the factors that seemed to promote literacy development in the home environment, in the ‘bedtime story routine’. One of the reasons for the success of this reading was the books that were used. As Holdaway says, ‘The language of the books used by parents, even with infants below the age of two, is remarkably rich in comparison with the caption books and early readers used in the first year at school.’ Parents read to their children and the children engage in this activity, for the sheer pleasure and satisfaction of sharing the books.
