ABSTRACT
This chapter is about peer culture and its importance in Amber Class children’s reproduction of literacy practices. It concerns the children’s production and maintenance of an in-class peer culture, which included their own values attitudes and beliefs – which might be seen as small, local discourses – about literacy and how it should be practised in school. A value the children held within their peer culture was for sharing engagement with schooled literacy tasks discussed in Section 1 of the chapter. In Section 2, I describe the children’s practice of peer-to-peer copying. This practice incorporated the children’s interpretations of schooled literacy, leading them to develop specific requirements for the practice. I describe these requirements, drawing on data examples that illustrate each one in turn. In the final part of the chapter, I describe how these requirements had arisen from the children’s shared interpretation of participation in schooled literacy activities as involving competitive practice. This means that as the children, as a group of children, learned to read and write in school, they acquired particular values, attitudes and beliefs about what this meant that directly affected the way they practised literacy in the classroom.
