ABSTRACT
What is learning to read and write? Fundamentally, it is an extension of the functional potential of language. Those children who don't learn to read and write, by and large, are children to whom it doesn't make sense, to whom the functional extension that these media provide has not been made clear or does not match up with their own expectations of what language is for.... Fundamentally, as in the history of the human race, reading and writing are an extension of the functions of language.... This is what they must be for the child equally.
