Reading education: Diverse audiences, new text typologies, new times

Abstract

As the contemporary textual landscape is reshaped in a digital post-typographic age it becomes important to recognise that print is now only one of many media channels in our culture through which we communicate. The textual artefacts and accompaniments of a computer technology make a significant difference to the way in which texts are read. These ‘ways’ are unlike anything possible with paginated text. There are no suggestions here that print-based practices are obsolete, or that the silent, solitary contemplation of the written word is now passe. Nor do we suggest that the flexible text might be a means of relieving code-breaking difficulties. Therefore, while there can be no embargo on the place of print texts in reading agendas, there can be no parallel denial of the emerging importance of multimedia, digital texts in the community lives of children and adults. These changes in the textual environment need to be explicitly addressed in primary pre-service teacher education courses in universities. Extant issues concerning the differential distribution of print-based reading competence by class and ethnicity are currently rendered more complex by unequal access to new text forms. Over 40 years of research indicates that middle class children of dominant ethnic groups more readily recognise the literacy practices of schools, and are, in turn, recognised and skilled as readers in school. The advent of multiliteracies has disturbed this pattern, and there is evidence to suggest that new forms of economic and social advantage and disadvantage are emerging in relation to literacy skills. It is therefore imperative that pre-service teachers be prepared to build socially-valued outcomes on the multi-literacy competencies of diverse sets of learners.