ABSTRACT
This chapter develops an integrated perspective on language, literacy, and the human mind, a perspective that holds important implications for the nature of reading, both cognitively and socioculturally. I start with a brief discussion of the converging areas of study that constitute the background for discourse-based and sociocultural studies of language and literacy. Then, I turn to a particular view of the mind as social, cultural, and embedded in the world. This view of mind implies that meaning is always situated in specific sociocultural practices and experiences. After a discussion of how this notion of situated meaning applies to reading, I turn to a discussion of cultural models, that is, the often tacit and taken-for-granted, socioculturally specific "theories" through which people organize and understand their situated experiences of the world and of texts. I then discuss how humans enact different identities in distinct forms of spoken and written language conveying distinctive situated meanings and cultural models. I close with a brief discussion of some implications for literacy research and practice.
