LITERACY AS SOCIAL PRACTICE AND CLASSROOM CHRONOTOPES

Abstract

Recently, researchers in a broad range of fields have defined reading and writing as social practices. This article discusses two sets of social relations involved in reading and writing practices: (a) author‐reader social relationships, and (b) participant social relationships. Each set of social relationships has implications for issues of authority, power, social identities, definitions of knowledge, emotional relationships, and social group identity. Building on Bakhtin's (1981) construct of chronotope (time‐space relationships), this article also discusses two views of time in classroom settings that are related definitions of reading and writing as social practices: (a) time as quantity, and (b) classroom chronotopes.