Mind the Gap?

How best to support children’s literacy development is a perennial issue in education worldwide. Despite repeated confirmation that children’s ability to benefit from certain classroom activities relates directly to their experience of these activities outside school, there nonetheless remains a dearth of empirical research conducted in children’s homes. This book makes a significant contribution to the field by analysing the domestic and scholastic literacy development of a trilingual child aged 3-9 years. Based on an unprecedented corpus of approximately 800 texts interpreted from a sociocultural vantage, the author illuminates meaning making and taking via texts deployed as a multifaceted socio-semiotic tool. The potentially wide, hybrid nature of domestic literacy emerges, as does its embeddedness in the particular sociocultural contexts we negotiate as part of our identity construction. Providing invaluable insights into domestic and institutional literacy practice, and written in a highly accessible manner, this book is an important point of reference for all parties interested in early literacy development in local and cross-cultural mono/plurilingual contexts.