It is now commonplace to assume that the written language used in basal
readers should be adjusted to the spoken language of learner. Otherwise the
beginning reader has to learn a new style or dialect at the same time as
learning to read; and it is assumed best to learn one thing at a time. Thus,
much scorn has been poured on "primerese" of the type Run, Spot, run. See
Spot run, Jane. Such primerese does of course make a plausible attempt to
con trot the language presented to the beginner, but the basis of the selection
may be wrong. Lexical items are chosen for their regular sound-letter
correspondences, shortness, and so on, rather than for their contribution to
meaningful connected prose. More recently, it has been argued that an approximation of reading primers to the spoken language of beginners
should also involve discourse organization. This is important, given the
general failure of attempts to break reading down into discrete subskllls,
such as vocabulary recognition, identifying key ideas, and so on. Both local
and global textual organization appear to contribute to reading comprehension,
and to be inseparable.