ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a brief overview of developments in the teaching of reading and writing in Sweden. While the situation is a dynamic one, concern is expressed about the lack of knowledge of the theory on which teaching methods are based. Before the seventies, methods used for teaching children to read were never called in question and synthetic methods had, up to then, dominated. In the 1950s the alphabetic method was replaced by phonics. Reading primers were introduced, based on this synthetic/phonic method. In the seventies however, a Swedish version of Learning Experience Approach (LEA) was introduced. Teachers working with LEA maintained that the traditional testing programmes did not give justice to ”their” children’s reading ability, since they, from the start, were taught to read for meaning and not primarily for decoding lists of words.
