The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy

by Edited by David R. Olson , Nancy Torrance

• ISBN13: 9780521680523
• ISBN10: 0521680522
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This handbook marks the transformation of the topic of literacy from the narrower concerns with learning to read and write to an interdisciplinary enquiry into the various roles of writing and reading in the full range of social and psychological functions in both modern and developing societies. It does so by exploring the nature and development of writing systems, the relations between speech and writing, the history of the social uses of writing, the evolution of conventions of reading, the social and developmental dimensions of acquiring literate competencies, and, more generally, the conceptual and cognitive dimensions of literacy as a set of social practices. Contributors to the volume are leading scholars drawn from such disciplines as linguistics, literature, history, anthropology, psychology, the neurosciences, cultural psychology, and education.

Table of Contents

Literacy as a Scientific Subject

The literacy episteme (from Innis to Derrida)

Literacy and Language

Grammotology

Speech and writing

The origins and co-evolution of literacy and numeracy

Are there linguistic consequences of literacy? Comparing the potentials of language use in speech and writing

Becoming a literate language user: oral and written text construction across adolescence

The challenge of academic language

The basic processes in reading: insights from neuroscience

Language and literacy from a cognitive neuroscience perspective

Literacy and Literatures

Ways of reading

Conventions of reading

Literacy, reading and concepts of the self

Reading as a woman, being read as a woman

Literacy and the history of science

Scientific literacy

Digital literacy

Literacy, video games and popular culture

Literacy and Society

Ethnography of writing and reading

The origins of Western literacy: literacy in Ancient Greece

Literacy from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, c. 300-800

Chinese literacy Feng Wang

The elephant in the room: language and literacy in the Arab world

Literacy, modernization, the intellectual community and civil society in the western world

Literacy and Education

The teaching of literacy skills in Western Europe: an historical perspective (16th to 20th centuries)

The configuration of literacy as a domain of knowledge

Literate thinking: metalinguistics and metacognition

Cultural and developmental predispositions to literacy

Literacy and international development: education and literacy as human rights

Adult literacy education in industrialized nations

New technologies for literacy and international development

Literacy theory and literacy policy

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