ABSTRACT
The decade of the 1980s has witnessed far-reaching changes in ways of thinking and in kinds of research as much as in educational practices around reading and writing. Perhaps the most obvious sign of this is the shift from ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ in the 1970s and early 1980s, to ‘literacy’. ‘Literacy’ has become one of the overworked clichés of the present period, and in the process has been nearly voided of usefulness. When the term is stretched not just to media, computer or technological literacy but to the metaphorical extremes of cultural, moral or, as most recently, emotional literacy, does it remain a term worth preserving? In these uses literacy seems to mean not much more than (competence in) some form of culturally significant behaviour. More recently, the term is almost invariably pluralized. Individuals all have or use multiple literacies. What is this change about? What does it mean?
