ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the elements of a socialization theory for learning to read, and focuses on implications for both schooling practices and remedial endeavours with children having difficulties learning to read. As a skill, and even more so as a symbolic skill, becoming an expert represents an idiosyncratic response to particular environments. Inventive conformity to the requirements of classroom programmes is a characteristic of children who make satisfactory progress at school. Their adaptation to or exploitation of what programmes have to offer can be explained with the concepts used for precocious readers. John Guthrie's claim for a causal relationship essentially is that this constitutes a societal practice which makes reading a salient and expected activity. Knowledge of the processes which influence family patterns is needed if deliberate attempts to influence literacy are to be maximally effective. Contemporary researchers have argued very strongly against an 'ethnic' or 'cultural centric' view of child-rearing which judges other groups as deficient in child-rearing techniques.