ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that reading aloud can be a way of being with others – and that ‘being together’ takes many forms: as members of communities, as family, as lovers, partners and spouses. It argues that this relates to ideas of domesticity and intimacy and the polarities of public and private that both domesticity and intimacy suggest, as well as that oral reading can be used as a form of mediation between these spheres. Interviewee RH remembers working within a community whose voices had been ignored through a process of class-based political oppression. Like the earlier examples of literacy mediation, teachers are supporting their learners in accessing a form of literacy by bringing something external and challenging into the realm of the familiar. Sometimes the oral reading is part of a linking, translating, relocating, re-contextualising or reframing between outer worlds of strangers, work or public affairs and inner worlds of domesticity, intimacy and established relationships.
