ABSTRACT
Prehistoric people used pictures to convey information, as did several more recent cultures without writing systems in North America, Central Africa, South-eastern Asia and Siberia. Many modern writing systems are, however, alphabetic; that is, they use a different letter, or a group of letters, to represent each distinctive sound in the spoken language. English written words like DOG, SHIP and PISTOL are also transparent because their pronunciation is straight forwardly predictable from their spelling to anyone who knows the normal correspondences between English letters and sounds. Things may be changing a little with the development of other technologies for recording sound and vision, but it remains the case that literacy opens the door to a vast range of social and cultural experiences that are barred to the illiterate person. It is vital that we understand the nature of the reading skill and find better ways to help the members of our society to acquire it and benefit from its use.
