Looking Beyond 'Skills' and 'Processes': Literacy as Social and Cultural Practices in Classrooms (original) (raw)

1997, Literacy (formerly Reading)

This article explores the thinking and research that has led to a view of literacy as social and cultural practices. Literacy is described not as an internal cognitive state or a universal set of skills and processes that individuals must learn, but as social and cultural ways of doing things through the use of text. This view adds to our understanding of literacy by switching the focus to the ways in which individuals, groups, communities and societies put literate practices to work. For teachers, this means thinking about the sorts of literacies they are trying to produce through their programmes. This implies studying classrooms and preschools as social and cultural settings where particular practices count as good work ± asking which kinds of texts, ways of talking, reading, writing and behaving are preferred and why.

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