Various South African and international studies indicate that the preparation of teachers to teach reading is inconsistent across universities worldwide. Teacher preparation programmes lack rigorous research-based findings as the grounding for their programme design. Recommendations of some studies point to the fact that evidence-based research should be incorporated to address this inconsistency. There is a need for a comprehensive curriculum to guide pre-service teachers toward a coherent knowledge base for the effective teaching of reading, as many teachers do not have an understanding of what to teach. The study on which we report analysed a teacher preparation programme with the aim of identifying which reading literacy components (that are embedded in knowledge of language structure) are included in the programme. The results show that the reading literacy components are included haphazardly within the teacher preparation programme and there is no evidence-based research included in the curriculum of the pre-service teachers.