Chapter 10: Play as Group Improvisation: A Social Semiotic, Multimodal Perspective on Play and Literacy

In recent decades, there has been a “social turn” in the study of literacy (Gee, 2000). Literacy researchers have begun to consider literacy as a social activity, and to attend to the ways literacy develops as children interact with others. Moving beyond traditional approaches that have focused on the acquisition of reading and writing as discrete and separable skills possessed by individuals, this sociocultural approach to literacy studies focuses on the ways in which literacy is a social practice, a process that occurs between individuals. Reading and writing, in this view, are deeply bound up with an individual’s wider ability to understand and produce texts that are meaningful to others (Gee, 1989; Kress & Street, 2006). Literacy development is understood as a matter of learning to participate in the meaning-making practices of one’s social group. From this perspective, it becomes important to attend to the social contexts in which children participate, in order to understand how they learn the literacy practices of their communities.