ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss the perspectives from which young children’s engagement with school-assigned literacy tasks might be understood. I argue that a schooled perspective on young children’s in-school literacy practices is overly narrow and does not allow a clear enough view of what those children are doing. To widen this view, I describe an LSP perspective on literacy and how it has been applied to researching children’s literacy practices. Following this, I describe two further theoretical lenses, Foucault’s theorisation of schools as disciplinary institutions and Corsaro’s theory of interpretive reproduction, which can be applied to LSP to sharpen the focus on institutions of schooling and young children’s activity within them. I argue that these combined perspectives offer a robust yet flexible theoretical framework to explore young children’s interpretive reproduction of in-school literacy practices.
