This paper examines literacy as a sociocultural, personal and human practice dependent on and derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Drawing on a recent empirical research study that combines learner, teacher and author perspectives [Curtin (2023) "Reading and Writing Pathways Through Children's and Young Adult…

Reading literacy is a multidimensional construct in terms of text and reading processes. Much research has examined the divisibility of the processes underlying reading, but they have treated the rest of the construct as unitary. This study extends the examination of dimensionality to a neglected area in literacy studies. It tests reading models…

Reading mediation is a concept used in Latin America and Spain, referring to the nurturing role played by adults in forging relationships between children and books. In this article, we conceptualize reading mediation as a 'technology of affect'. We propose 'mediation-as-usual', a normative becoming of this technology, tasked with producing…

The present study was based on the Turkish sample in PISA 2009 and PISA 2018. To investigate the effect of both gender and economic, social and cultural status index on reading literacy, the causal mediation effect was utilized in order to test the mediating role of the following variables: enjoyment of reading, the metacognitive strategy of…

The semiotic world that we inhabit (within and outside the academy) is fast changing in terms of the resources that are used and the practices in which many engage. Yet the institutional norms governing highly consequential academic texts--students' texts assessed as part of their disciplinary-based activity and scholars' papers submitted for…

This paper explores beginning pre-service teaching students' common perceptions of the meaning of the term literacy. The methodology used is described in terms of phenomenographic analyses and the outcome, an array presentation of concepts in diagrammatic form. It establishes that students' conceptions of literacy are embedded predominantly in the…

This paper examines the report of the "Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy" (Department of Education, Science & Training (DEST) 2005) and explores the claims it makes about reading pedagogy and the centrality of particular "methods" or "approaches" to teaching backed by "scientific" evidence. Discourse…

Beginning with the premise that pleasure is a driving force in life, this article examines the relationships between pleasure, schooling and society across the past century. Through the examination of school texts, narratives, and histories of literacy instruction, a case is made that part of the move away from keeping pleasure at the heart of…

This article assumes that literacy practices are social practices. Based on the New Literacy Studies (Street, 2005) this view of literacy provides an understanding that the ways a person reads and writes change, depending on that person's identity, the type of texts that are involved and the context in which those texts and identities are located.…

Amongst academics working with postgraduate students, there has recently been increasing interest in ways of supporting advanced academic literacy (AAL). This is a concern for us at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where we teach a diverse group of postgraduate students, most of whom are subject practitioners in…

This article examines assessment of students' visual literacy. In the context of current theory of multimodal texts, the author presents key features for visual literacy assessment and how this assessment might be undertaken. The article then proposes a set of principles and a framework for developing assessment tasks in authentic classroom…

Students in Further Education colleges in England read and write in many different kinds of ways in different areas of their everyday lives. As part of their participation in Further Education, these students face a multitude of literacy demands: through the bureaucracies of the college, the pedagogic content of their courses, the textual nature…

Findings from this study of how two pairs of eighth-grade students each transacted with a website during think-aloud sessions at the conclusion of a curricular unit on Mexico and migration highlight the ways the students engaged in three interrelated tasks: (1) Identifying and making sense of "new" information; (2) Evaluating claims and evidence;…

This paper describes the impact of an oral retelling of Homer's "Iliad" on pupils' learning in Key Stage 2 classrooms (children aged 9-11) in schools in East London. We argue that the oral nature of the retelling and responses promoted high levels of engagement and inclusion, leading to enhanced understanding by the pupils. The use of a…

Research suggests that children's understanding of text can be improved by the explicit teaching of those comprehension strategies that are used implicitly by skilled readers, particularly the use of self-regulating strategies to generate questions about text. This study of the teaching of comprehension in 51 London Key Stage 2 classrooms explores…