ABSTRACT
This book began by describing its content as a kind a journey, one that brought together classrooms, language and ethnography to create a new perspective on literacy. Language in education in general, and literacy in particular, have been at the core of our concerns in producing it. In the Introduction, we acknowledged the long history of research and scholarship into education and language, and language in education. We also recognised the shift in research perspectives in each of these fields that took place from the mid-century point, and the impact that this orientation had on methodology, theory and practice. There is little doubt that classroom based research increasingly took on qualitative approaches from this time; ones which looked at the ‘culture’ of classrooms. Yet, so-called ‘naturalistic’ research had less impact on language research in general, and language in education specifically, preoccupied as it often was with the form of pedagogic discourse and the structure of utterances. The rise of New Literacy Studies was an early acknowledgement of the necessity to view language in education through a socio-historic lens. In order to do so, some kind of anthropological approach was necessitated, and has indeed been realised in various attempts at classroom language ethnographies. However, such ethnographic perspectives raise issues of theory, practice and method. Ultimately, the aim of this book has been to develop these aspects of literacy research from both a NLS and Bourdieusian perspective.
