ABSTRACT
A social practice is thus enacted with other people, not alone. If reading is perceived as a social practice, it cannot also be seen as either lonely or passive, even when undertaken by a solitary, silent and still individual. In a foreshadowing of arguments for an ecological approach what Vygotskian insights can help us see is the limitation of approaches to reading which yield information about discrete elements rather than the whole. Vygotskian informed social understanding such as this can fundamentally affect teachers critical enquiry and pedagogy. In many subsequent research projects, Mercer along with collaborators such as Littleton has drawn on Vygotsky's insights to research classroom dialogue in particular, which is to say classroom talk as a social practice. The author should stress that he will be discussing the particular practice of adults reading literature aloud well with young people, also an inherently social practice, not the rather different, often reviled, practice of students themselves reading round the class.
