ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications of attempts to recognize and incorporate students’ out-of-school culture within school, focusing on the challenges and difficulties that are raised for literacy education in the world’s most “over-schooled” society, South Korea. Multiliteracies and new literacies theories and research have flourished in countries such as the UK, the USA and Australia over the past 20 years, fundamentally challenging the epistemology and ontology of traditional and functional literacy, proposing an ideological definition of literacy (Street 2000). This approach examines literacy as multiple, sociocultural and discursive practices, based on the participants’ own language and culture that vary according to diverse social contexts, modes and media of communication created by digital technology (New London Group 1996). This chapter discusses how these theoretical projects might have limitations in terms of their impact on formal literacy education in South Korea.
