ABSTRACT
Despite a vast amount of study since the end of the nineteenth century, reading and literacy are still very confused research areas. Literacy involves not only psychological processes in the individual reader. It is also a linguistic process, closely dependent on the reader's knowledge of his language; and it is a social process which has different expectations and values attached to it in different communities. Detailed experimental studies on small aspects of reading are of course necessary, but work on literacy is just as much in need of attempts to integrate findings from widely different disciplinary areas (Chapter 1).
