The complexity of the acquisition of skills required to even begin reading has prompted considerable debate as to when reading instruction should begin and particularly whether a cognitive threshold should have been attained. This concept suggests that pupils who struggle learning to read are simply not cognitively mature enough and that waiting for maturation rather than engaging with instruction would be the most effective strategy. It may have been, therefore, that the pupils in this thesis’ study merely required more time to develop reading skills and that an intervention was unnecessary.
This concept of reading readiness has its roots in the early twentieth century with Huey’s (1908/2012) recommendation that if a child were unable to read a text, then it should not be read; ‘Its very difficulty is the child’s protection against what it is as yet unfitted for,’ (1908/2012:57). Dewey (1899/2017) also recommended that a child need not be exposed to text before the age of eight and in some cases ten years old. Huey (1908/2012) concurred with the eight-year-old threshold and recommended no formal reading instruction until the habits of spoken language had been well formed; the curriculum would focus on promoting the desire to read (Diack, 1965). ‘Delay as a teaching technique’ (Anderson and Dearborn, 1952: 345) developed into common educational parlance with the belief that any reading difficulties encountered by the age of seven would be resolved by cognitive maturation. The age of seven as a threshold dovetailed with the accessing of Piaget’s (1952) concrete operations stage and tallied with Dolch and Bloomster’s (1937) observations that children with a mental age below that of seven were unable to match printed words to spoken words.
However, Rayner et al. (2012) question the validity of reading readiness as a biological construct arguing that if this were the case, children would begin reading instruction across the world at a similar age. This is not the case, with some cultures not starting until seven with others beginning at five and no consistency across English speaking nations. The age reading instruction begins is, therefore, they contest, a poor predictor of reading outcomes at age eight and nine and if reading readiness were a legitimate construct it would be expected that countries (like England) that start instruction early would report increased reading problems which is, they argue, not the case. In a study of Hungarian, Dutch and Portuguese children no effects of age that were independent of years of instruction were found (Vaessen et al.,2010).
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