Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School (Language and Literacy Series)

Dyson supports efforts to make literacy curricula accessible to our schools’ socioculturally diverse population. This two-year ethnographic study of K–3 children focuses on six students who would normally be deemed “at-risk” and who do not tell stories in the written language format valued by most early literacy educators. Their literacy learning, particularly their writing development, is portrayed as a social process in a complex social world. Dyson’s key theme is the link between composing a text and composing a place in this social world.