ABSTRACT

The powerful effects of parental modelling are carried beyond merely a good example of enthusiasm and interest in those techniques which ask parents for considerable personal involvement in the reading process in addition to just monitoring. The Plowden Report data suggested that schools in working-class areas gave parents less opportunity to contact school, while it was just such parents who expressed the strongest desire for more information. Environmental factors are of course significant in the aetiology of reading failure. But researchers have by and large chosen to ignore the possible relevance of incompetent teaching, lack of suitable materials, poor staffing ratios, and so on, apparently preferring to scrutinise the pupils' home environment for reasons for lack of attainment. The research begins to show a degree of utility when it turns to consider reading as a developmental process, carrying the implication that at different ages and stages different types of failure might occur.