Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0750709286, Paperback)

In its first edition, Social Linguistics and Literacies was a major contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of sociocultural approaches to language and literacy, and was one of the founding texts of the ‘New Literacy Studies’.

This new edition includes much updated and revised material, and discusses some of the criticisms that have been made of the 'New Literacy Studies' and how work in this field relates to current debates about reading, literacy and schools. Critically examining digital literacy in the context of popular culture, the book also:

engages with topics such as orality and literacy, the history of literacy, the nature of discourse analysis and social theories of mind and meaning explores how language functions in a society through the exploration of the notion of ‘Discourse’, it surveys the current state of the field with specific reference to cross-cultural issues in communities and schools.

This book serves as a classic introduction to the study of language, learning and literacy in their social, cultural and political contexts. It shows how contemporary sociocultural approaches to language and literacy emerged