Teaching Reading: Lessons from the Experts

Abstract

There have been several investigations into the effective teaching of reading, but very few into the qualities of teachers who are effective practitioners in this area. In this article, the authors report some of the findings of a project commissioned by the Teacher Training Agency to investigate the characteristics of effective teachers of literacy. The effective teachers studied had a number of features in common, including a coherent set of beliefs about the importance of meaning in literacy teaching and an ability to help their pupils to make connections between language at the text, sentence and word levels.