Nothing that has been said thus far should be interpreted as denying that there must be highly specialized research on many facets of the reading process. But should not both basic and applied research make much more explicit the assumptions concerning the total transaction within which any one element in the reading event may function? The experimenter who is concerned with determining the physical conditions under which spoken utterances may be transmitted by telephone is quite ready to recognize that the physical, linguistic, and general cultural and
life equipment that the hearer brings to his listening will condition what he hears, as well as what he interprets. Difficulties arise when these contexts or frameworks are fogotten and the results of narrow experiment are looked upon as significant in isolation. Can it be that many of the efforts to compare various techniques of inducting the child into reading have yielded indeterminate results because elements were being studied without sufficient concern for how these elements fit into the particular reading transactions being studied?