Defining language and literacy

This edited book is about language and literacy in the primary years of schooling. The question of what counts as language and literacy education in this digital age has driven the direction of recent literacy research and educational reforms. Central to the ongoing debates about language and literacy education is the common understanding that basic print literacy is no longer sufficient for active participation in the global economy. Recent digital technologies have changed the way learning, text production and communication are taking place for young people. Teachers are looking for resources on key concepts related to language and literacy, genre-based pedagogies and ways of using digital technologies to engage their students in negotiating and composing multimodal texts. In this book, we focus on the Australian Curriculum: English (Australian Curriculum, Assessment & Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2013a) and supporting teachers on teaching writing and composing in the primary school years. Although we pay attention to these focus areas, we would like to make clear that we repudiate the assumption that literacy is confined solely to the ability to acquire decontextualized, measurable cognitive skills such as reading and writing page-bound texts and that literacy learning is restricted to formal education. Hence, by way of introduction, we begin by first articulating our theoretical perspectives of language and literacy. These perspectives are more clearly illustrated in the various chapters of this edited book.