ABSTRACT
The critical study of literature had descended into school from Cambridge English and the work of F. R. Leavis. The new methods of literary study had brought with them no great attention to wider literacy nor to initial teaching of reading, or indeed to reading as such. It is worth stressing that this challenge, in the new school English, was to a certain highly partisan view of literature and not to the importance of literature as such. James Britton's influence in this regard cannot be underestimated. The new school English offered a different account of literature, not the supplanting of literature as the core of English studies by language. There is little notice taken of reading as such. Similarly, in the programme of research envisaged by the Schools Council English committee, a groundplan of investigations which shaped English teaching through to the report of the Bullock Committee, reading receives only a passing mention.
