ABSTRACT
It would be fair to say that the past 40 years have been turbulent times in regard to the psychology and teaching of reading. This is a good thing. Different theories have provoked disagreement and generated a lot of research and this has helped to make our understanding of reading a lot clearer. We are now a lot closer to understanding reading and how best to teach it, but we are not there yet. This chapter is in two parts. First, we give a brief overview of how two major theories of reading, top-down and bottom-up, have collided in the past four decades and how a lot of good has come from this. Second, we look at the implications of the theoretical debates for the teaching of reading.
