ABSTRACT
Although the students in the ninth-grade English class were often seen by the school as students who were deficient in literacy, the students revealed to me the many ways in which literacy mediated their lives outside of school. The students reported a wide variety of reading or writing activities that were part of their everyday lives. Each of the students engaged in certain literacy practices because of particular practices in place specific to some dimension of the home or community social networks. One of the activities in the home community that the students used literacy for was cooking. Another area in which the home/community allowed for literacy practices was with storybook reading. What became apparent was that this family practice led to adolescents reading to their younger siblings as well as being read to by their older siblings when growing up. This is family practice that offered many opportunities for the adolescents to share in literacy practices within the family.
