Abstract:

There is currently significant interest in the promise that oral mental flexibility may hold for understanding how children learn to read in complex alphabetic systems like English. Most often operationalised as ‘set-for-variability’ (SfV), longitudinal experimental and intervention work is currently being undertaken by a number of teams exploring its relationship to typical and atypical reading development. This presentation first considers the case for SfV, and then the existing evidence from intervention for teaching SFV is considered. Past and present studies are critically reviewed before some description of future empirical work is outlined. Finally, conceptual questions about the role of mental flexibility more generally in reading development are considered.