ABSTRACT
Ideas around literacy are intimately connected with, and often derived from, theories of language. They, in their turn, can and do come from very many fields: from linguistics of course; but also from psychology, anthropology of certain kinds, literary studies, sociology, media theory, and so on. Given that literacy is very much an applied activity, its practitioners can be highly pragmatic in their uses of theories: they are not in the least bit worried about borrowing eclectically: a bit from here, a bit from over there, and some other bits from somewhere altogether different. The current common sense about language in literacy is an amalgam of forms of anthropology, sociology, literary studies, with strong influences from psychology, media and cultural studies, and in fact with remarkably little contribution from linguistics itself. ‘Phonics’ of course derives from a branch of linguistics, namely phonology and phonetics, but otherwise, linguistics is noticeable largely by its absence.
