Florence "Flo" Davies was a British applied linguist and reading specialist associated with the University of Birmingham and, later, the Open University. Her work sits at the junction of ESP/EAP and the teaching of reading in both L1 and L2 contexts. She is best known in ELT as co-author (with Tim Johns) of the 1983 paper that introduced the TAVI / TALO distinction, and as the author of Introducing Reading (Penguin, 1995), a book-length argument for treating reading as a socially situated act rather than a set of mechanical comprehension skills.
Davies's writing treats readers as agents engaged with real texts for real purposes. Much of the pedagogical common sense now taken for granted in EAP reading courses (authentic texts, purpose-driven tasks, close attention to genre and thematic structure) was articulated by Davies before it was absorbed into the mainstream.
With Tim Johns, Davies published Text as a vehicle for information: The classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language (1983, Reading in a Foreign Language 1(1)). The paper is a compact manifesto. Against a reading classroom dominated by text-as-linguistic-object exercises, Davies and Johns argue for text-as-vehicle-of-information: reading that starts from the learner's informational purpose, treats the text as something worth understanding for its content, and defers language-focused work until meaning has been secured.
Davies's most accessible single work. The book traces contemporary developments in reading theory and aims, in her phrase, "to socialize and humanize reading and the teaching of reading." Central moves include:
Davies also published on academic writing and thematic structure, notably Reading between the lines: Thematic choice as a device for presenting writer viewpoint in academic discourse (1988). This strand links her to the wider Birmingham tradition of text and discourse analysis (Halliday's legacy filtered through Sinclair and Coulthard) and to later EAP work on stance, voice, and writer positioning (Hyland and others).