Literacy

There can be few areas of education which have been more controversial than the teaching of literacy.

In an increasingly information-dense society, the ability to make sense of and to produce text is crucial to success, and literacy has understandably assumed the burden of the benchmark of 'educatedness'.

This four-volume collection covers the major debates about exactly what it means to be literate and how literacy can best be taught.

Rather than centering on the emotional reaction of mass media debates, this set will focus on research findings into processes and pedagogy.

Volume One Literacy: Its Nature and its Teaching This will concern the nature of literacy, and its role in modern society.

Literacy has been analysed in a number of ways, each of which has profoundly different implications for approaches to its teaching.

If it is seen as a set of technical skills then teaching will tend to emphasise mastery of skills and sub-skills.

If on the other hand it is seen as a set of cultural practices then teaching tends to be viewed more as a guided enculturation of social processes.

Debates about literacy are therefore merely academic, but affect views of teaching and learning. Volume Two Reading - Processes and Teaching The teaching of reading has been a particularly controversial area for debate.

The material in this volume emphasises the research side of debates such as 'whole language versus phonetics', 'meaning-centred approaches versus code-centred approaches' and the 'real books debate'.

Volume Three Writing - Processes and Teaching A number of key debates and theoretical positions have emerged in the teaching of writing, and this volume examines these, beginning with the widespread impact of the 'process writing' movement best represented in the work of Donald Graves, and moving through to the genre debate.

Volume Four New Literacies - The Impact of Technologies Literacy is not a static set of processes or practices.

Technological innovations bring with them new ways of producing and encountering text and traditional ideas about the nature of literacy are currently being challenged by new media.

This final volume looks at the new literacies brought about by the internet, email and text messaging, and how these impact upon literacy practices.