Reviews

Understanding Reading Develop-ment. Colin Harrison (2004) London:Sage. ISBN: 0-7619-4251-3; d17.99 (pbk);203pp.1

It is now almost two years since Sir JimRose published his Independent Re-view of the Teaching of Early Reading.(DfES 2006). The publicity it occasionedhas mostly died down, but waves ofgloom continue to reverberate: those ofus with broad and liberal understand-ings of what reading is and whatreading is for regret Rose’s insistenceon discrete synthetic phonics as ‘‘theprime approach to establishing wordrecognition’’ (2006:20), and are uncon-vinced that the ‘‘broad and language-rich curriculum’’ (29) into which thisteaching will be positioned will beanything like broad or rich enough tomitigate the reductionalist and techni-cist assumptions that so often accom-pany phonics teaching in the earlyyears. Where, in all this discrete decod-ing work, we ask, do children learnwhat reading is good for?

It is refreshing then, to read ColinHarrison’s new book UnderstandingReading Development. Here the approachis neither reductionalist nor technicist.Taking as a central proposition Flau-bert’s exhortation to a correspondent:

Do not read, as children do, to amuseyourself, or like the ambitious, for thepurpose of instruction. No read in orderto live. (1857)

Harrison argues that reading in order tolive supposes a moral duty: we need toread in order to learn to be. By implica-tion, those of us engaged in the teachingof reading are undertaking a moral andpolitical enterprise: we are helpingchildren to develop the tools they needto be human. It behoves us to make theteaching of reading as rich, as mean-ingful and as life enhancing as we can.And we need to do it well.

What follows is a complex web ofargument to that point. Harrison makeshis case by means of a number ofstrands of intertwined argument. Firstis his personal subjectivity as a readerand postmodern thinker: this leads himto reject simplistic understandings of‘‘scientific’’ research into reading acqui-sition and reading assessment and therhetoric that flows from them, in favourof classroom-based, particular, ethno-methodological explorations and cele-

brations of practice. Second is a wideranging review of research into read-ing, which sees reading as a social,historical and literary activity, as well asa cognitive task; and third is his accountof various classroom activities, thefruits of teacher research and goodpractice.

It is in this third strand of argumentthat Understanding Reading Developmentis at its most engaging and most likelyto appeal to the teachers to whom it isaddressed. In chapters written withteacher-researchers, Harrison showsus how six year olds can engage inDARTs activities, how eleven year oldsmake sense of the text books they readand how teachers can model co-opera-tive reading tasks to teenagers. Theseepisodes amply illustrate the point: thatreading should be, and can be, mean-ingful and transformative – and theygive the book an energy that is some-times missing from theoretical texts.

But it is the theoretical underpinningthat supports these episodes that ismost impressive. Two chapters in par-ticular stand out. The first, in whichHarrison provides an overview of read-ing, which, though firmly located in thepolitical present, is informed richly byhistorical, literary and philosophicalperspectives, positions him firmly inthe great liberal tradition of educators.There is a whiff here of almost Arnol-dian stature in the scope of his moralinterest. The second, chapter three,deals with the complexity of whatunderstanding is. It shows another sideof Harrison’s scholarship. This chapterranges from a discussion of the impor-tance of memory to an exploration ofthe strengths of latent semantic analysis(read the book if you want to knowwhat this is) by way of oral poetry, storystructure and schema theory, and in itwe see the academic at work, ratherthan the polemicist. Here is a mindgrappling with diverse, big ideas andmaking them easily accessible to thereader. Together, these chapters pro-vide what is so often missing in thediscussion of reading in the media, andin the evidence submitted to parlia-mentary select committees: an erudite,educated, richly informed explorationof what reading is and what readingmight be.

Those readers who are not new toHarrison’s work will find much theyrecognise in Understanding Reading De-velopment: the thinking on early readingand on assessment, for example, hasbeen published elsewhere. What makes

this book particularly worth while forme is the connective tissue, the thinkingbehind the thinking that shows thebreadth of Harrison’s scholarship.Any writer who can move swiftly anddeftly from A. B. Lord and his theoriesof oral formulaic poetry to Wibbly Pigin a mere two paragraphs deserves therespect of us all!

FLAUBERT, G. (1857/1974) ‘letter to Mlle deChantepie, June 1857’, in Oeuvres completesde Gustav Flaubert, Tome 13: Correspondance1850–1859. Paris: Club de l’HonetteHomme, p 88.

ROSE, J. (2006) Independent Review of theTeaching of Early Reading. http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/phonics/report.pdf

Vivienne SmithUniversity of Strathclyde

1This is a slightly amended version of areview which was first published in theBritish Journal Education Studies, 56, 1,115–117.

Literacy and Gender Gemma Moss(2008) London: Routledge.ISBN: 0-415-23457-3; d24.99; 220 pp.

You need to read this book. I can tellyou this unequivocally (well, almost)because if you’re the kind of personwho reads the reviews section ofliteracy journals, you’ll want to takeaccount of the arguments Gemma Mossmakes in this important new book.

The subtitle of Literacy and Genderis ‘Researching Texts, Contexts andReaders’.

The book does exactly what it says onthe cover, in relation to primary educa-tion, thinking through where we arenow in our understandings of literacyand gender in the light of changes intexts and developments in school. Mossbrings to the book the clarity of analysisand commitment to classroom-basedresearch which characterise all of herwork. She moves easily between repre-sentations of recognisable classrooms,populated by children and teachersgetting on with the everyday realitiesof life, and astute commentary onresearch and theorising in the field.What is particularly satisfying, to this

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reader at least, is the way that the bookas a whole is crafted to develop andbuild an argument. The clarity oflanguage and thought are rooted intwo decades’ worth of Moss’ researchand thinking about literacy, but herstance is very much about understand-ing and improving the ways in whichliteracy education is currently con-structed and experienced by children.So the book has an energy and drive toits arguments and plenty to say toresearchers, policy-makers and tea-chers (and not exclusively primaryschool or specialist literacy teachers).

Moss’ argument is about the ways inwhich the social construction of genderand ‘ability’ relate to the literacy curri-culum in primary schools, and theimpact this has on the identities androles children adopt in and out ofschool. The book begins with a veryuseful overview of the impact of genderpolitics on educational policy, tracingthe ways in which feminist concernsabout girls’ education and under-achievement have been reframed todirect the focus towards boys’ attain-ment, particularly in relation to literacy.Moss pays particular attention to twostudies, by Judith Solsken and BenteElkjaer, which influenced her ownresearch design and analysis. Thesestudies focus on the cultural and socialcontexts of learning: both Solsken’sanalysis of literacy as ‘work’ or ‘play’across home/school boundaries andElkjaer’s analysis of the gender dy-namics of IT classrooms, in which boysare keen to adopt the status of ‘hosts’while girls are more willing to be cast as‘guests’, resonate with Moss’ own ob-servations of gendered literacy beha-viours, described in later chapters.

In chapter 2 Moss explains her viewof literacy as social practice and hermethodological focus on literacy eventsas the unit of analysis. Adopting thisapproach allows her to consider howthese events, and the practices thatconstitute them, are understood fromdifferent perspectives and how theyrelate to the roles and identities of thevarious players in the classroom. Thispaves the way for the nuanced analysisof her own data that follows in the nextthree chapters, which provide insightsinto the different literacy practices anddefinitions of literacy operating withinsingle sites, the boundaries between

these practices, the orchestration ofliteracy events by teachers and bychildren and the management of thoseboundaries and events in relation togendered identities.

The focus of the book is on thereading, more than the writing, curri-culum. Moss identifies three differentways of reading in school: for profi-ciency, where how well the child readsis of most importance; for choice, wherewhat is read matters most; and proce-dural reading, where reading is inci-dental to accomplishing something else(p. 69). Her underpinning argument is,broadly, that the literacy events andpractices which have the greatest sal-ience for children, parents and teachersrelate to proficiency, and that thereforewhat counts as reading in school isclosely bound up with the social strati-fication of readers. She analyses ‘profi-ciency slots’, such as the child’srehearsal of his or her reading book toan authoritative adult, and argues thatthese events have effects which leachout into the rest of the curriculum,including into the structuring of timeand space within the school. Drawingon Bernstein’s work, Moss shows howdifferent subject positions, created in-directly through pedagogic discourseand organisation of the classroom spaceand activities, are taken up by children.These subject positions are related, inpart, to where the child stands in thehierarchy of reading proficiency butalso in relation to gender identities. Sowe meet Mitchel, a Year 4 boy consid-ered by his teacher to be a weak readerbut a self-styled expert on weapons,narrowly avoiding humiliation whenhis failure to read the text leads him toconfuse a flying bomb with a spy planein front of his friend Terry (p. 140).

Terry: ‘‘I thought you said that was a spyplane?’’

Mitchel: ‘‘I did’’

Terry: ‘‘(It’s one of those) one of those flyingbombs’’

Mitchel: ‘‘Well I know/In the Second WorldWar’’

Terry: ‘‘It’s like a flying bomb’’

Mitchel: ‘‘Yes, they look like planes’’

Terry: ‘‘But they were bombs’’

Mitchel: ‘‘Yeah, cos what they done, coswhat they wanted to do was fly them intoEngland and then crash them, oh no look,it’s a crashing plane. And then, missile ishitting us, pilot crash. [Makes sound ofexplosion] Oo,oo,oo. [Making sound of asiren]. Doctor, Doctor!’’(Moss, p. 141)

One of the great strengths of the bookis the exemplification of the argumentsthrough the transcripts and research-ers’ field notes. We see clearly from theexample why Mitchel might want tohang on to the highly pictorial non-fiction text that he had got to know sowell. We see too, perhaps, why Mitchelmight be understood to be engaged inidentity work which is not simplyabout expressing a preference for non-fiction.

Moss’ book helps us complicate theissues in order to understand thembetter. She questions orthodoxies aboutboys’ and girls’ tastes for particulargenres of text by raising questionsabout the design and structure of fictionand non-fiction, and the opportunitiesfor social rather than individual workthat these textual structures afford. Shecautions us against simply followingboys’ perceived interests which, sheargues, will not in itself remedy thedifficulties they face or act as a guideto where to go next (p. 190). Sheconcludes that girls may in fact benefitin terms of literacy development fromthe fact that there is less concern aboutthe need to cater to their interests, sothat the support they are offered tendsto focus more clearly on reading asan end in itself, rather than as anadjunct to something else. She thinksabout establishing patterns for readingin school and out of school, whichserve the purposes of formal schoolingbut can also be sustained across thelifespan.

This is a terrific book, full of carefulobservation, scholarly knowledge andgood-humoured affection for the play-fulness and resourcefulness of childrenand the everyday circumstances inwhich teachers work. If you haven’tread it yet, you should!

Christine HallUniversity of Nottingham

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