ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 has shown the importance of the home and community where children have already become competent speakers and listeners and where, as well as their unique family narratives, they have had access to a variety of media materials: TV, film, video, music, computer games, mobile phones and other aspects of digital technology (Hall et al. 2003). They share a cultural landscape and communicative practices outside school from which they will have drawn ‘textual toys’: media materials, songs, narratives, characters and images (Dyson 2003). These unofficial media materials will soon become part of their official school concerns and are part of their developing literacy practices where, through a process of recontextualising, they will intricately weave their textual toys into official school contexts (Dyson 2003: 15–17).
