ABSTRACT
In an autonomous model of literacy, according to Street, literacy acquisition is assumed to involve solely internal or “in the head” operations and, as such, is an apolitical, context-neutral, skills-based process of learning to read and to write. Known-answer questions are those often used in school discourse, where the individual asking the question already has the answer—or at least, has an idea of what an appropriate answer would be. In contrast to an autonomous model of literacy, an ideological model of literacy considers literacy to be not simply a series of discrete skills to be independently acquired—for example, a cognitive process by which the brain learns to decode and encode print text—but a dynamic, and historically and culturally situated, set of social practices.
