ABSTRACT
In the intellectual growth of children and young people, checking the development of spatial cognition, particularly in map reading, is a central concern for the geography teacher. A major group of concepts encountered in the early stages of geography teaching are those concrete vernacular concepts which relate, for example, to physical features of the landscape, such as 'river', 'valley', 'hill', 'mountain' and so forth. While geography makes appropriate claims to be a subject which stresses the cartographic and the visual, this is not to say that written and spoken language is not equally crucial to this subject as to others. An important element in teacher's writing, or that in textbooks, is the readability level, readability referring essentially to the degree of ease with which the material can be read by a group of learners. Bloom regarded the main job of the teacher as fostering successful learning, and advanced the concept of mastery learning.
