Re‐discovering practical reading activities in homes and schools

Abstract

This paper explores issues arising from the long‐standing theoretical and empirical attention to reading as a specifiable set of psychological processes, and the consequences of this attention for parents’ and educators’ deliberations and practices. The argument is developed that these theorisations and research projects have both driven and been driven by the social and interactional configurations that teaching has traditionally been taken to entail. It then offers a critique of available theories and research findings from the perspective of ethnomethodology, along with a brief description of an ethnomethodological approach to reading as a co‐ordinated set of practical social activities. The paper proceeds to exemplify what an ethnomethodological approach could look like, through the examination of transcripts of reading sessions. The paper concludes that theories of reading need to deal fundamentally with the practices that learners, teachers and parents display as they engage in and ‘bring off’ as reading sessions, as phenomena to be explained in their own right, rather than as representations of available theories.