ABSTRACT
I make no apology for the focus in this final section: one of my own researches on children who could read when they entered primary school. This I will contrast for research approach with a community study on children with reading difficulties. Both researches made an international impact when published. My study of young fluent readers (Clark 1976) is still frequently cited, as are a number of my other publications on reading. This is also true of most of the publications to which I will make reference in this chapter (Hall et al. 2003; Whitehead 2004). As with many of my researches, the first, a community study of 1544 children, was made possible by enlisting the help of students, who undertook some of the individual testing. The aims of the two researches were very different, for that reason so too were the approach and the sample; the first was large scale, the second intensive. They therefore make valuable illustrative material to bring educational research alive.
