Colin Harrison 
Understanding Reading Development 

This book focuses on how to understand reading processes and what it means to develop reading comprehension. With a wide-ranging theoretical basis, the author makes new connections between work in critical theory, cognitive psychology and literacy.

Key features include:

} how and why we read

} evaluating response to reading

} a whole-school approach to developing reading.

This book is highly recommended to teachers, literacy coordinators and students and lecturers of masters and doctoral programmes with a reading or literacy focus.

Table of Content

Reading Reading

What Does Research Tell Us About the Reading Process and the Early Stages of Reading Development?

Understanding Understanding – Colin Harrison and John Perry

Developing Reading Comprehension – How We Learn from Texts

What We Have Learned from Research

Literacy Development in the Primary Classroom – Colin Harrison with Geraldine Kotsis

Fun, Phonics, Fluency, Fantasy and Developing Reading for Meaning

Case Studies of Reading Development at Secondary Level – Colin Harrison, Alan Dewar and Steve Willshaw

Developing Critical Literacy

Text, Discourse and the Collaborative Construction of Meaning

Evaluating Response to Reading

Can There Be Such A Thing As Postmodern Assessment?

A Whole-School Approach to Developing Reading

Policy Staff Development and Evaluation

About the author

Colin Harrison is Professor of Literacy Studies in Education at the University of Nottingham. His work is well known in the United Kingdom, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He is a former president of the UK Reading Association, and was a founder editor of the Journal of Research in Reading.

He has been commissioned by the Scottish Office and by the UK government to write reviews of research in order to strengthen national initiatives whose intention is to have literacy policy firmly grounded in research.