ABSTRACT
Law’s notion of the kaleidoscope, as simultaneously the world and a way of looking at it, propels this chapter into an investigation using corpus linguistics. Two specialist corpora were created for this project, from newspaper media and Twitter data. Newspapers displayed public discourses around literacy education concerned above all with reading, and within that emphases on phonics and love of reading. Phonics is shown to be sedimented into public understandings of literacy, and love of reading presented positively, in connection with print books. The Twitter corpus was shown to be dynamic and diverse, with temporal shifts in popular topics, some maintaining broad interest but others spiking briefly. Some professional actors are shown to be particularly effective in mediating ideas and practices in the field of primary education literacy, including some outsiders.
