Literacy

This chapter offers an integrated review and discussion of the major advances in theory and practice in the area of literacy, with particular focus on the work since 2014 onward. For the purposes of this review, it approaches Literacy as the ability to read and write. For reading, the chapter highlights theoretical advances that expand the view of reading and its relation to prior knowledge and digital context and practical advances on the impact of language and content-area instruction, assessment, as well as technological innovations. For writing, it also highlights theoretical advances that expand the view of writing and its socio-cultural context, and practical advances on the impact of self-regulated strategy instruction and technological innovations. It then highlights that despite the reciprocal relation between reading and writing, these two areas of work have largely evolved independently of one another, with only recent work directly integrating the two theoretically and practically. While in this review we focus on recent advances in literacy research, it is important to acknowledge the current context in which this effort has been undertaken. National (NAEP, 2022 Reading Assessment) and international assessments (e.g., PISA) continue to underscore the prevalence of inadequate reading and writing performance in students of all ages. There are also wide and persistent opportunity gaps for students living in poverty, as well as for students from marginalized racial and ethnic groups and multilingual students, raising concerns about systemic inequities in both assessment and instruction (Patton-Terry, 2021). Addressing these opportunity gaps is an educational imperative that should be central in ongoing literacy research efforts (Burns et al., 2023). [This chapter is published in: "Handbook of Educational Psychology, 4th Ed.," Routledge New York, 2023, pp. 553-575.]