Introduction: Part I

The papers in this section are partially a reflection of a two-day meeting held at the New York Academy of Sciences on May 7 and 8, 1982 which was chaired by Drs. Elaine Fenton, Frances Podwall, Beatrice Kachuck, and myself. The meeting was entitled: “Reading and Reading Disabilities: Scanning the 80s from Left to Right,” and was intended to expose practitioners to a range of problems and diversity of perspectives in literacy research. While there are still those who argue about whether “language” is innate or not, there is no argument about literacy being an acquired skill and an acquired skill of a quite complex type. A child may not be reading for a wide variety of reasons. These could range from being “simply” based on a physical deficit to being caused by the inability to process linguistic elements; or they could reflect a lack of societal needs and pressures (in nonliterate societies, there is no need to read). The variety of papers included here reflects this range of concerns. It is not a totally inclusive selection: papers on basic neurological processes and those dealing specifically with syntax or with the current area of discourse processing and text cohesion can be found elsewhere. Nonetheless, the range of topics that are covered is impressive and should serve to underline the basic message that the attainment of literacy does not represent a unitary process nor a unitary set of skills. What follows from that revelation, of course, is that approaches to remediation may have to be as varied as the processes involved. The first paper, by Scribner, addresses the larger cultural issues and suggests that reading skills are bound up with the social milieu in which the individual learns to read, which includes the purposes for which reading is done. Using a unique situation in which three separate language systems (English, Arabic, and Vai) are available in the same culture, Scribner presents a fascinating picture of the different kinds of skill promoted by different kinds of literacy. (This is in contrast to the usual approach to the study of literacy, which seeks to examine requisite skills only.) A major conclusion is that one cannot ignore the socially embedded nature of reading and reading skills. Thus, treating “reading” as a unitary skill is problematic, and may account for our difficulties in teaching it, testing it, and remediating when difficulties are present. Reading is a “mystery” because, although we can identify what component processes may be involved in its skilled accomplishment, we do not yet know how the parts are organized into a whole. We know that even though we can philosophically separate the lexical elements (words) from their organization (syntax) and meaning (semantics), all these elements interact in sig-