Literacy practices as social acts and Literacy and motivation share an interest in the question of what engages children in reading. Both are relevant to our political times, when the federal government micromanages literacy education in schools. The U.S. federal initiative “No Child Left Behind” gave rise to the Reading First grants, and both are designed to “get kids reading at grade level.” Reading First ended up not including “motivation” as a rationale for funding. The government's preoccupation with phonics instruction has superseded the more important issue of what makes a child want (or not want) to read in the first place. Literacy and motivation is a useful corrective. However, Cynthia Lewis's Literacy practices as social acts really gets at the heart of the matter.

By carefully examining how children do and do not engage in literacy-related social practices in classrooms, Lewis's ethnography, based on a year-long study in 1993–1994 of a fifth and sixth grade classroom, tells us precisely what our national conversations about literacy should be about. Lewis focuses on five students and their teacher while examining literacy practices that are common to many classrooms and already well documented: read-aloud, peer-led literature discussions, teacher-led literature discussions, and independent reading.

What makes Lewis's book so important is that she avoids the puffery that surrounds much of this type of research. Lewis systematically explores these practices, providing profound insights into what must be an extraordinary task: treating the all too familiar classroom setting as a “strange” place. Lewis's work reminded me of Geertz's description of “exotic cultures,” of his method of interpreting the way people made sense of their lives by paying attention to the ordinary details of everyday life. He located “in the tenor of their setting the sources of their spell” (p. 120).

By embedding her theoretical orientation in the context of performance and gender theories, as well as of ritualized practices – while never forgetting that literacy practices must be understood from a sociopolitical, cultural, and critical stance – Lewis vividly demonstrates how identities are discursively constructed, and how various identity markers “intersect and compete to complicate life in school and create the social drama that shapes the local scene of the classroom” (51).

Lewis's introduction alone is worth the price of the book. Her summary of performance theory is extremely important and useful, explaining that special attention must be given to the ways in which communicative acts are executed, and that we are constantly being “evaluated” by our listeners (and by ourselves). Applying the work of the anthropologists Bauman & Briggs (1990) to this fifth/sixth grade classroom, Lewis describes how a performance view of literacy sees context as dynamic in relation to performers: “An individual or group performance is created by context that is re-recreated by the performance” (16). Lewis is careful to point out that her study is grounded in the theoretical orientation that accepts the dynamic interplay of context and performance as central to classroom life.

In chap. 2, “A social geography of the classroom and surrounding community,” Lewis examines (i) her five focal students through the lens of social and academic status, augmented by ethnographic data about these students' social and academic identities within the classroom, the school, and the community; (ii) the larger context of the school and community that helps shape these students; and (iii) how literacy education is discursively constructed by the school district and how these practices play out in the teacher's classroom. Although all five students are white, Lewis never neglects issues of race and class. Rather, she argues that “literacy practices are enacted by readers who have been constructed through social codes that shape their relationship to peers and texts” (44–45). Instead of resorting to framing her work in terms of convenient discursive binaries (black/white, middle class/working class), Lewis wisely recognizes how the intersection of identity markers such as gender, age, ability, social class, and race within an entire school (for example, in the lunch room) creates the “social drama” that shapes the social life in the individual classroom that she studies.

Chap. 3 critically explores what is perhaps the most mundane, morally freighted, and common literacy practice: reading aloud to children. Virtually all literature on literacy education requires that adults read aloud to children. It has become the hegemonic norm for what constitutes “good teaching” and “good parenting,” where the preoccupation is to enjoy and love literature. Lewis doesn't challenge this dictate; rather, she seeks to understand this practice as a means the classroom teacher uses to enact the classroom culture. She investigates both the collective and the disharmonious dimensions of social community that the classroom teacher promotes.

Here, reading aloud serves as a classroom ritual, bound by the “rules” that govern the students' and teacher's everyday, unquestioned performances. Issues of gender are particularly revealing. Despite the teacher's efforts to use the read-aloud ritual to construct a common classroom community as “a story that made some sense,” several boys removed themselves from that community. These boys sat outside the inner circle, usually not participating, manipulating the available social codes within that particular context to resist the expectation of the classroom teacher and the girls. As this community's perceived outsiders, they took up positions in relation to their own arenas of power and social relationships. For them, the read-aloud session was a feminized practice, and they rejected it. Further, when one of the boys asked if students could draw at their desks during this time, the teacher told him no, that they couldn't do two things at once. But she does allow the girls to style each other's hair during the reading sessions.

Chaps. 4 and 5 contrast two sides of the same coin. Influenced by the midcentury work of linguistic and cognitive researchers and literary theorists, as well by anthropological conceptions of social and cultural forms of literacy, many teachers began orchestrating opportunities for small groups of children to engage in conversations about books. Central to this approach is a reader-based theory of instruction intended to help children “transact” with the text in order to come to understand literature from their own point of view.

These conversations take several forms, including the styles that Lewis's analysis contrasts: peer-led versus teacher-led literature groups. In chap. 4, Lewis is clear that in this classroom, “the most obvious conflicting norms were those associated with social class” (86). Not surprisingly, middle-class children whose family dispositions matched those of the school were more competent in the book conversations than were children from working-class families. However, social class intersected with ability, age, and gender, shaping events in peer-led literature groups. For example, while the rule of thumb appeared to be that students could “choose” whichever books they wanted to read, book selection was in fact shaped by a “discursive construction of ability.” While the teacher encouraged and orchestrated opportunities for “choice,” the classroom operated under only an illusion of choice. More proficient readers read the more sophisticated books, and less proficient readers (usually from lower socioeconomic strata) were encouraged to read easier books. Ultimately, schooling in the United States operates under a set of available and implicit discourses which students are quick to read and within which they quickly position themselves.

During peer-led groups, talk was used to achieve social and interpretive power, and such power was achieved based on whether one was an insider or outsider. For example, girls, even when not designated leaders of the group, would assume the role of directing the discussion. Allegiances they had formed both in and out of the classroom also provided children with power when discussing books. The contributions of both boys and girls who did not have social status in the classroom were generally disregarded in peer-led groups; or, for fear of intimidation or that they would be put down by their peers, they remained silent.

Teacher-led literature groups were a different matter. Because the teacher held control, children spent less time contesting each others' opinions, although certain students still had more interpretive power. The classroom teacher felt strongly about her role as an active member of the literature group. Children, therefore, were encouraged to see the text as a historical and social construction, as with discourses of individuality, and to probe and resist the ways in which certain cultural assumptions and textual ideologies “shaped the readings of texts and experience” (122). The teacher's continual push toward textual critique allowed her to get children to think about their interpretive processes. Further, the meaning of interpretive competence was refined and expanded beyond that of student-led groups.

Lewis's clear-eyed portrayal of this teacher gives the book much of its impact. Lewis doesn't whitewash her; we read about her own biases (she favors the girls), and there is clearly a sense of literary elitism. Yet, as portrayed by Lewis, she is smart and reflective. I'd have given anything for her to be my own son's fifth grade teacher.

Literacy and motivation demonstrates, in 16 contributions from various scholars, just how wildly complex the term “motivation” is. Over the past several decades – in education, anthropology, psychology, and popular culture – scholars have attempted to demonstrate what motivates children not only to read, but to learn in general. Ludo Verhoeven & Catherine Snow's new book examines literacy and motivation from three perspectives expressed in the titles of its sections: “The social and affective context of literacy development,” “Prevention and instruction programs that promote literacy engagement,” and “Policy perspectives on promoting literacy engagement.”

The commendable diversity of perspectives in the volume is also one of the book's weaknesses, however. Some chapters do a good job of connecting directly to the theme of motivation while others don't even mention the term, leaving the reader to make the connection. In this review, I have space to discuss only a few of the chapters.

The editors' introduction envisions a “world of engaged readers” (2). They link literacy and motivation in several dimensions, including a summary of experimental research that emphasizes phonological representation of graphic symbols, automaticity, and effortless recoding – all gained as a product of many opportunities to practice reading. Children must have an “active voice in their own development” (5) and access to books “as the vehicle for resolving the literacy crisis” (6). Literacy education should emphasize “parents as sensitive to their children's literacy attempts” as well as classroom settings that provide “sequentially structured activities that are mediated by a teacher” (7). The authors include a section that attends to “literacy across cultures,” where they acknowledge the cultural specificity of literacy.

Ultimately, however, in spite of efforts to represent a broad perspective of literacy, the chapter seems to reproduce the old-school maxim, “First you learn to learn to read, then you read to learn,” as the authors put forth their hope that the “later school years can be fostered by planning socially purposeful lessons” that include “time to reflect … and to achieve depth of meaning and understanding” (8). The greater road to motivation, I suggest, is to reverse that maxim: First one reads to learn, and in the process one learns to read.

In David Barton's powerful chapter, where he describes the everyday literacy practices in a British working class community, one gains a clear understanding of motivation. As Barton makes clear, literacy can be understood only as something that occurs locally, historically, and within networks of social relations. Literacy is used in a range of everyday contexts, in and out of the home, in terms of organizing life, personal communication, and private leisure. Most literacy learning occurs outside of school. Barton writes that parents and others in the home can do much to support children's literacy development, but this does not necessarily mean that “parents should take on the practices of formal education and be expected to act as school teachers” (36). He adds that when one begins by examining everyday literacy practices, it becomes clear that (i) there is not “less reading today” than at some other imagined time, and (ii) everyday literacy practices are highly motivating in and of themselves.

The two chapters that follow Barton's focus on parent-child book-reading dyads and on the social and interactional nature of reading. Despite their authors' excellent research, these chapters are troubling in their unspoken ideological bias. Adriana Bus examines parent-child book reading at home through the lens of attachment theory. She begins with the standard trope: Book reading “plays an important role in becoming literate and in preparing preschoolers and kindergartners for success in school” (39). Since she frames the issues strictly in terms of formal schooling, this narrows the impact of Bus's work. She then summarizes studies that emphasize how the “positive history,” “quality of the relationship,” and the “emotional bond” between mother and child affects the reading routine. We discover that “insecurely attached mother-child pairs … are less inclined to develop daily book-reading routines than secure ones” (43); insecure pairs were “less likely to constitute an interactional context that fosters children's engagement and thus proved less rewarding” (47).

All this shows that simply reading to your child is not enough. Since “emotional relationships between parent and child can embrace or inhibit interactive routines that offer literacy learning opportunities” (51), literacy programs focused on the parent-child dyad can even be counterproductive. Bus doesn't make any recommendations, although she wants to find programs that support families differently than many present family literacy programs do. I worry, however, that schools pathologize “nontraditional” families enough without looking at parent-child relationships as just one more reason to find fault.

Jeanne De Temple & Catherine Snow's chapter also examines the quality of conversational patterns between parent and child in relation to future experiences in school. The authors look at the incorporation of “nonimmediate talk” – talk that goes “beyond naming pictures and repeating text” – between parent and child about books they are reading. Variations of nonimmediate talk have already been studied within the framework of Bernstein's “elaborated and restricted codes” and Shirley Heath's description of “contextualized language” (Snow 1991, among many others who have written about decontextualized use of language). All these scholars, including De Temple & Snow, attempt to identify a regulative principle that determines the selection and combination of elements, and in these cases those elements that enter into a limited range of paradigmatic relations.

I admire De Temple & Snow's emphasis on the inextricable link between conversations and literacy, as well as their careful linguistic analysis of parent-child conversations. However, instead of using conversation as a means by which one can “assess” one's literacy skills, I wish they had made concrete connections to motivation. One is left to conclude (as I did) that a certain kind of conversational style improves reading outcomes (as measured by school) and is therefore motivating.

As with Bus's chapter, I wondered how De Temple & Snow hoped this information might be used. Are we to teach parents how to use nonimmediate language to prepare children better for school? What, if any, is the role of “nonimmediate language” in the types of literacy practices that Barton describes? It is easier to stress how to prepare low-income students for formal education than to critique the systems that turn them into low-income people in the first place. If suddenly all low-income mothers spoke “nonimmediate” language with their children while reading books, would their status change? As Brian Street writes later in this book, reading engagement “does not automatically give rise to empowerment” (298). Finally, while the usefulness of “nonimmediate” use of language may sound compelling, if it is indeed important then why can't it be taught in school, like any other secondary discourse? A large part of the reason that middle-class parents use nonimmediate (or decontextualized) language in the first place is that they acquired it as a result of their success in school.

Standout chapters that cannot be detailed here include those by Robert Serpell, Rose-Marie Weber, David Reinking, and Brian Street. All demonstrate that literacy must be understood in terms of concrete social practices; its meanings vary from situation to situation; and people's understandings of those practices must be understood within the ideologies in which those practices are embedded.

In sum, both these books have much to offer in the area of literacy and “motivation.” However, as Jim Gee says in the introduction to Lewis's book, there is not a reading crisis in schools; there is an “affiliation crisis.” Participation in any social practice requires that the person be willing and able to take on the identity that this practice demands, and thus to participate fully in the norms, values, and attitudes required of the practice. Nothing that has emerged from the U.S. federal government lately comes close to addressing this point. Lewis tackles these difficult issues better than anyone in a long time. She has set the stage for further research in this crucial area.