ABSTRACT
Beyond the problematic framing of children and their families that exists within both the design of Hart and Risley’s study and the discussion of their findings, many critics of the study have pointed to its small sample size and its inability to be replicated to any significant degree. “Transnational” literacies, a term first coined by literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is another way of framing the contextual nature of literacy and its attendant practices, particularly as they transcend and/or intersect across social, geographical, and even textual boundaries. While certainly race, culture, and ethnicity—and the social power assigned to these factors—influence how students’ language and literacy practices are either privileged or viewed as a deficit in school spaces, socioeconomic class also often plays a role, as it so egregiously does in the discourse around the so-called word gap.
