A new way of looking at reading and writing: Literacy as a social and situated practice

At the end of Chapter 1, I suggested that to view literacy (and numeracy) merely as a skill misses out important aspects of what is happening when people read and write. In this chapter, I pursue this argument and present an alternative to the common view of literacy as just a skill: the idea of literacy as a social practice. I will explain what the concept of literacy as social practice means and how it was developed, mention some of the researchers who favour it and briefly describe examples of studies that are associated with what are called the ‘New Literacy Studies’.