ABSTRACT
My concern with literacy is with the uses and meanings of reading and writing in everyday life. Like many colleagues who take a ‘social practice’ approach to literacy (see below), I see the school domain of literacy as one amongst many, with its own features, styles, genres, requirements. What is the relationship of this ‘schooled literacy’ (cf. Street and Street, 1991) to the everyday literacy practices that we all engage in remains a question for research. The ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS1) approach (cf. Street, 1984; Gee, 1990), which I describe below, argues that what this relationship is cannot be assumed, rather we need to find out exactly how it works in given contexts. Indeed we might expect, from what research in this field already tells us, that it will vary from one context to another and one time to another. So I approach the debates about the National Literacy Strategy (I refer to this as NLS2 since it began and the acronym was coined about a decade after NLS1) with this question in mind – what is the relationship between the kinds of reading and writing that have been developed by NLS2 strategists, teachers, examiners and policy makers and the actual uses of reading and writing that the pupils they are interested in actually engage with in their daily lives?
