ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the messages about the uses and the operation of literacy which children might get in a typical primary classroom coincide, or do not, with their knowledge and uses of literacy outside school. The chapter is constructed around a description of a, hopefully, fairly typical lower junior (Year 3/4) classroom. As we examine this classroom in more detail we shall be concentrating particularly on the ways in which the classroom environment, the activities provided, and the actions of the participants in this classroom may influence the beliefs the children come to hold about what literacy is and what it involves. It can be quite difficult to tease out the messages children get from particular elements of their experience of a classroom. Much of this analysis is speculative, and we may decide that children receive contradictory messages from different aspects of their classroom. But it can still be revealing to try to look at a classroom in this rather different way.
