ABSTRACT
There are at least two myths abroad in literacy education, the one having quite an old history, the other being much more recent in its origins. The first, and older of the two myths (whose origins are in fact some centuries old), is that which holds that the learning of literacy is a particular, even a unique, task for the first years of schooling. Learning to read and write is a matter primarily of mastering the spelling, handwriting and punctuation systems, and hence of being able both to make meaning of the words on the printed page, and to construct meanings oneself by writing. The teacher's role in this view of things, is to focus in particular on teaching these systems, often indeed at the cost of sense and meaning, so insistent can the demand be to teach and reinforce such things as a sense of sound-letter correspondence. The second myth, dating in particular from the 1970s and 1980s, is that which proposes that the learning of literacy is a ‘natural’ process, and that it is learned in much the same way as is speech. In the model proposed in this case, the teacher's role is to be at best supporter and facilitator as children develop skills with literacy in largely untutored ways.
