ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses contemporary theories and definitions of literacy and multi-literacies and how they relate to middle years students. It examines literacy practices of, and for, diverse middle years students. The chapter presents some useful models and ideas for the teaching and learning of reading and writing in the middle years classroom. In recent years political and mainstream media discourses have been responsible for fuelling polarising debates regarding literacy and literacy standards in Australia. The idea of reframing literacy as a complex social practice is relatively new. In the first half of the twentieth century a skills-and-drills approach to literacy was sufficient in order to navigate a world that relied largely on oracy and print-based texts. Multiliteracies is a term devised by Cope and Kalantzis in the year 2000 that acknowledges the impact of different social and cultural contexts on a diverse range of text types, including print, non-print and hybrid forms.
