ABSTRACT
The field of literacy research has been something of a battlefield in the past decade. In many countries, government funding has been tied to ‘evidence-based’ research, favouring large-scale clinical studies. In OECD countries, vociferous debates have taken place between researchers favouring clinical psychometric quantitative approaches and those favouring qualitative approaches. Cross-disciplinarity, in fact, has been a feature of literacy research since its inception and continues to be the strength of the field. This chapter reviews the strands of literacy research and their relevance to literacy in multilingual contexts. There is also a focus on mixed-method approaches, which are proving most productive in the study of literacy in diverse contexts.
