ABSTRACT
The chapters in this book represent many different perspectives on the same landscape. This landscape includes the terrain that children must negotiate in order to reach the final destination that researchers and educators are all concerned to help them reach—the state of skilled adult reading. This chapter aims to describe what this destination looks like and, more important, why it is the chosen destination. If beginning readers are to be provided with the best possible maps and guides to the route they must follow, an understanding of why skilled adult readers converge on a particular destination (as opposed to some other one) is essential. The present chapter focuses on the nature of skilled single-word reading, because it is there that most progress has been made in understanding the demands of the task and the different types of solution that may be possible. 1
