ABSTRACT
This chapter considers literacy as social practice with a specific focus on the socio-cultural influences on boys' classroom literacy experiences. An international focus on literacy as a key plank for nation building has fostered a culture of performativity, driven by neoliberal, high-profile, high stakes testing, which has been used to generate new concerns about boys' lack of achievement in school, particularly in literacy. Internationally, changes in relations of social power, in abolishing existing settled hierarchies to remake new ones, and changes in economic structure are altering the communicative landscape. Reading literacy improves understanding of new technologies and facilitates their diffusion and implementation-factors which impact on economic growth. Literacy has been attributed with developing cultural sophistication and liberating communities and at the same time viewed as an ideology of middle-class schooling. The growth and heritage approach is a child-centred orientation to learning.
