Helen Silva de Joyce’s research while affiliated with University of New England and other places

One important motivation for writing this book has been to widen the view of literacy and literacy education by examining theory, research and practice across a broad range of contexts. Rather than providing second-hand descriptions of exemplary recent studies, this chapter offers the reader the opportunity to hear directly from researchers who have studied various aspects of literacy and literacy development, including language, numeracy, cognition and community issues. It includes exemplary studies in which a range of methodological approaches have been applied, including participatory research, studies of community and family literacy, and text analysis.

In the past it was assumed that people learned to read and write at school and that was the end of the matter. The belief was that school-based literacy skills would enable people to move on to and participate in further education and the workplace. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, researchers (for example, Barton, Hamilton & Ivanič 2000, Barton & Ivanič 1991, Baynham 1995, Clark and Ivanič 1997, Hamilton, Barton & Ivanič 1994, Heath 1983) began to turn their focus to the social purposes and practices of literacy in contexts beyond the school, including tertiary education contexts, home contexts, community contexts and work contexts. These socially oriented researchers began to investigate ‘the different literacies associated with different domains of life’ (Barton et al. 2000: 11) and this led to an interest in how adults managed in different contexts with varying levels of literacy skills and how these could be measured (for example, Black 1989, Wickert 1989).

Children learn to talk at home before they are taught to read and write at school. The spoken language (or languages) children develop during interaction with close family members at home becomes the foundation on which their learning continues to develop beyond the home, in the wider community, in early childhood settings and eventually when they begin to learn to read and write formally at school. Similarly, the ways children learn to use other meaning-making resources at home, for example, images, numerical symbols and gesture, lay the foundation for the more specialised and more formal uses of these meaning systems in educational contexts.

Everyone has an opinion about literacy. When differing opinions about literacy are represented as conflicts in the media, through print and online newspaper articles and editorials, talk-back radio and online spaces, the spectre of a literacy crisis is raised, ‘usually … in relation to socio-economic change of some kind’ (Snyder 2008: 7). While commentary is sought from politicians, employer groups, teachers, teacher unions, experts and parents, rarely, if ever, are students consulted. Everyone who believes there is a literacy crisis can give an example of the crisis in action: young people glued to their various electronic devices using text language instead of correct language; the young woman at the local store who can’t add up the prices on a few groceries, young employees who can’t follow written instructions and schools that fail to teach grammar or that teach a grammar parents don’t recognise.

We now continue our journey through the continuum of school education and track literacy demands through the phases of schooling, as students move from the language of everyday experience to the technical and abstract language of educational knowledge. This phase of the journey begins in the early years of school with initial instruction in reading and writing. It then follows students as they navigate two critical literacy-dependent transitions: the first during the middle years of the primary school as teaching and learning increasingly revolves around learning in the subject areas, followed by the transition into the secondary school where the curriculum and the school day is organised in terms of educational disciplines (Shanahan & Shanahan 2014b). There is no clear pathway visible through the tangle of perspectives, theories, methodologies, evidence, claims and practices that is the terrain of research into literacy at school. Sometimes the most strategic tactic is to pause and look around carefully before deciding which direction to choose when taking the next tentative step. Such a tactic has guided the path taken through the field of school literacy in the chapter to follow. The path taken in this chapter, of course, is just one of the many possible ways through this crowded and at times disorienting terrain.

An exhaustive study of literacy in human society over time and space would require many volumes. A thorough examination of the many debates that have been generated by the study of literacy and literacy development in different historical periods and in different societies is not possible in a publication of this size. However, a broad review of the terrain makes it possible to reflect on recurring themes across different historical and cultural contexts and to challenge fixed ideas about what it is to be literate and how people become literate. Different historical and cross-cultural perspectives demonstrate that approaches used to study literacy are themselves products of specific times and places and continually need to be reviewed and re-evaluated as cultures, societies and their literacy technologies change over time.

Literacy has been researched using many research methodologies and from within many disciplines including history, linguistics, education, philosophy, semiotics, sociology and anthropology. This chapter presents a map of applied research methodologies that have been used to explore the field of literacy, primarily from social perspectives. It does not claim to be a comprehensive map covering all the forms of socially oriented research that can be applied to literacy, but throughout the chapter references are listed to extend the map in various ways. We have chosen to focus on those approaches which practitioner-researchers would find easier to work with in their local contexts. These approaches include action research, case study research, design-based research, discourse analysis, multimodal research, ethnographic research and verbal protocols. In addition, as shown in Chapter 2, historical research into literacy reveals how measures of what it means to be literate have changed over time. We finish this chapter with a brief explanation of meta-analysis because this statistical approach is now being used in educational fields to summarise findings from past studies in order to generalise about the size and nature of positive or negative effects of particular interventions on student achievement (for example, Hattie 2009). The final section of this chapter looks at what might constitute a continuing broad literacy research project into the 21st century, in which we hope our readers will participate.

This book is a guide to current research and debate in the field of literacies practice and education. It provides both an historical and lifespan view of the field as well as an overview of research methodologies with first-hand examples from a range of researchers involved in literacy research.