DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

The State of Reading Research

Progress in Understanding Reading: Scientific Foundations and New Frontiers
Edited by Keith E. Stanovich. New York: Guilford, 2000. 524 pp. Cloth, $56; paper, $36.

When one thinks of the big ideas in reading over the last few decades, they include a number of psychological and social constructs. Those that come to mind are concepts such as automaticity, psycholinguistics, phonemic awareness, schema, and the notion that literacy is a social phenomenon. The faultline along which many of these constructs divide is whether they fall into the social or the psychological realm. For the psychological set of constructs, it is surprising how many of these can be attributed either entirely or partly to Keith Stanovich and his colleagues. A volume such as Progress in Understanding Reading provides the opportunity to become reacquainted with some of those ideas, particularly those that have become such a part of consciousness that many fail to attribute them to their originators. I found it a very pleasurable experience to come upon pieces that I had read or heard presented and even some I had had the privilege of editing or reviewing for publication. As I read the volume there were even a few moments of anxiety related to remembering some of the controversies that arose over them, which had to be resolved in print.