In a very real sense this chapter is a progress report. Some years ago I decided that a major reason for the lack of forward motion in attempts to develop more effective reading instruction was a common failure to examine and articulate a clear view of the reading process itself. Knowledge, I felt, was non-cumulative in improving reading instruction largely because we either ignored the reading process and focussed on the manipulation of teacher and/or pupil behaviors or because we treated reading as an unknowable mystery.

Ironically two opposite views were and still are widely found in the professional literature:

1. Reading is what reading is and everybody knows that; usually this translates to ‘reading is matching sounds to letters.’

2. ‘Nobody knows how reading works.’ This view usually leads to a next premise: therefore, in instruction, whatever ‘works’ is its own justification.

Both views are non-productive at best and at the worst seriously impede progress.

My effort has been to create a model of the reading process powerful enough to explain and predict reading behavior and sound enough to be a base on which to build and examine the effectiveness of reading instruction. This model has been developed using the concepts, scientific methodology, and terminology of psycholinguistics, the interdisciplinary science that is concerned with how thought and language are interrelated. The model has also continuously drawn on and been tested against linguistic reality.