Literacy and development as discourse, cognition or as both?

Commenting on R&T’s ‘Developing Linguistic Literacy’ is not an easy task. Their attempt addresses precisely the right questions, in all their complexities and breadth, centring and bundling these questions in strategic and potentially novel ways, and thereby exploring new territories and encouraging investigators to enter these territories. However, I still feel left with a sense of incompleteness and exclusion when it comes to a more discursive orientation to theorizing literacy and development. Starting my commentary on R&T’s target article this way, I should mention that I approach literacy and development as someone whose research has shifted from studying ‘Language’ with a capital L, i.e. isolated aspects of language, how they are acquired by the universal but abstract ‘child’ with ‘ language’ in a vacuum, to what people (including children) actually DO with language – how they perform their daily activities with and in language in a meaningful way, and in doing so display and contribute to a sense of who they are (as groups and as individuals). In other words, I came to see development as always tied intrinsically to the development of the person, their display and sense of self and identity; and issues of talk (whether literacy, narrativity, or language in general) in terms of how they contribute to this development. The implication of this shift is not that questions such as how individuals learn to master or possess a repertoire of forms or actions that were not theirs before, or how what always was considered to be already theirs matures, so they can participate in joint practices with others become irrelevant. However, such questions become secondary to the question of how particular activities (and the way these activities are performed) contribute to the development of a sense of self and identity. Of course, within this framework talk is always considered as meaningful action, or at least as oriented toward meaning in action; it is, in its broadest sense, discourse, and as such embedded in social action and interaction. Reading R&T from this point of departure, their contribution can be viewed as an attempt to establish a linkage between more traditional