ABSTRACT

A school was selected on advice from the local education authority. Teachers were invited to explain their methods, reading schemes were examined and classroom activities were monitored, while mothers and children were interviewed about reading outside school. When the staff of the school were approached to discuss a possible study of children's learning to read, the class teacher of those children in the first year whose birthdays fell between January and April was particularly interested. To help interpret the studies it would be necessary to formally assess their abilities and to describe the contexts of learning – materials and methods in home, school and classroom. Their baseline skill was, however, sufficient to justify the attempts made by the teacher to guide the children through tracing and copying tasks. Most of the children performed at or below the norm, the rank-ordering of children was very similar across tests, and the reading scores lagged behind the general cognitive measures.