Literacy: whose complex activity?

Once one has mastered an ability to read fluently the process suddenly appears to be transparent. In fact this is precisely the way fluency is defined. As successful readers we don’t want the flow disrupted by any conscious ‘‘monitoring’’ awareness of the remarkable complexity that marks what we do as we go about making sense of the squiggles on the page. Thus rather than immediately thinking about reading as an active, ongoing hypothesis-testing procedure, it is comforting to believe that reading involves little more than establishing straightforward connections between symbols and meanings. With this belief firmly in place, instruction can be routinized and the resultant ‘‘learning’’ assessed mechanically through the unproblematic testing of how well children are able to relate sign to referent. How convenient to remove all the uncertainty of literacy behaviour through some direct scheme of decoding and comprehension.