Chapter 9: Social Contexts of Reading. This chapter focuses on the many social contexts in which reading is carried out and in which reading develops. We learn to read within a family unit, in various school settings (and their associated goals, expectations, and opportunities), in various classrooms, and in interaction with specific teachers and student peers. Students are also influenced by the wider social and cultural expectations of political, religious, ethnic, economic, and social institutions. Social contexts set the stage for successful reading within the first year of life, and language knowledge, as well as beginning reading, is profoundly shaped in the first five years of life. L2 reading, as it often is learned in childhood or adolescence, is also strongly shaped by social contexts in which learning to read is carried out. Four specific issues include the needs for effective teacher training, the status of minority language instruction in K-12 schools, advanced L2 reading instruction, and most importantly, the role of language and reading exposure throughout a learner’s lifetime. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.

Stimulating emergent literacy is one of the main goals of early childhood education. In order to accomplish this, the orientation to different aspects of literacy can be integrated into classroom interaction, as is shown in Chapter 10 of this Handbook. We demonstrate how early childhood educators can use children’s spontaneous attention to written text as a base for meaningful interaction by explicating their own acts of literacy and by talking with children whenever they read and write themselves. We also demonstrate how attention to literacy can be incorporated into shared reading interactions, by orienting the children to the structure of a story, the role of a book title and their understanding of the story. In addition, early childhood educators may organize meaningful activities in which children discuss literacy issues in peer interaction, while trying to write and to construct texts together. Illustrated by everyday examples, this chapter stresses the importance of eliciting meaningful teacher-child interaction and peer interaction around written text.

This chapter draws on the thinking of Freud, Bion, Ricoeur, Winnicott, as well as on the literary-psychoanalytic writings of Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas, to consider the value of psychoanalytic thinking and procedures in understanding the experience of reading literature in groups. The chapter argues that shared literary reading – specifically the live read-aloud model pioneered and practised by UK charity The Reader – creates conditions analogous to those of the psychoanalytic situation, particularly in providing a "holding" environment for, and stimulating the release of, unconscious material in ways that cannot be predicted in advance. In addition, the neutrality of the literary text in respect of the reader’s inner life makes available a wide range of possible interpretations of the unconscious material disclosed (in place of the single interpretative authoritative of the therapist) while also offering a personal-human language for interpretation and expression (in place of the language of therapeutic orthodoxy).