John Downing

John Downing (1922 to 1987) was a British educational psychologist who moved from classroom teaching, from 1947 to 1957, into academic research, beginning at the University of London Institute of Education in 1960 before relocating to Canada in 1970 to become Professor of Psychological Foundations in Education at what is now the University of Victoria. Over a 27 year academic career he published more than 300 papers on how children learn to read, working across three connected areas: the Initial Teaching Alphabet, an alternative beginning-reading orthography; the psychology of reading; and the comparison of reading instruction across different languages and cultures. His principal achievement was the cognitive clarity theory of learning to read, which holds that many children's reading difficulties come from confusion about basic concepts of written language, such as what a word or a sentence is, rather than from a lack of general ability, so that making the purpose and mechanics of print clear to learners improves how they learn to read.