ABSTRACT
Literacy is not just a set of skills and nor is it simply text on a page or screen. Reading and writing are social activities, ‘located in the space between thought and text’ (Barton and Hamilton 1998: 3). They are activities that need to be understood in their contextual particularity rather than as a set of assumed universal properties (Heap 1991: 120). The key issues in literacy as social practice are the social contexts in which reading and writing are learned and used; the kind and character of the event; the ways and purposes for which literacy is used; the values and beliefs that are emphasized; how reading and writing are part of social and cultural life; how the participants and the observers interpret what is going on; and how the activities of reading and writing construct notions of social and cultural life.
