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The socio-cultural perspective is a perspective from linguistics, from the most ethnographical, ecological, emic linguistics,
which observes human communities and tries to understand them in a global way.
The idea would be that our community is full of artefacts, different types of artefacts which we use to live our daily life,
in order to be people, simply in order to live, to live happily.
One of features of reading is that it is diversified. Every day we read in the most different of ways, because we read different objects, in different ways, to achieve different things.
Here we find a first idea which I find interesting, which is that from this ethnographic viewpoint, we can consider that “to read” is a transitive verb
and we all know how to read some things, and we are all illiterate in other things.
Student needs are, basically: processing the code, maybe we use other words, construction of meaning and development of self-regulating or meta-cognitive development.
Clearly, I would say that the aspects of processing the code can be common in general, while aspects of construction of meaning are not common,
because knowledge is not built up in the same way for a judicial sentence, Medical instruction leaflet or in a chat room,
and self-regulated activity, also highly probably has common elements and different elements.
This diversity of artefacts which we use in our community can be grouped into different area.
In the case of children we find the items to be found at school, which are very important, but we have many other areas in which they read and write.
For example, the area of sport, administration, which is of little importance in the case of children; we also have the area of religion and,
finally, we have a very important area, which is what is happening at home, what the students read outside school.
And here we have it, in line with this perspective, a clear black hole. We little or nothing about what happens in this context.
A kind of dichotomy is established between what we could call vernacular practices and those which are basically self-regulated.
This child decides to do it because he likes it, on his own, nobody is making him do it, these are self-regulated activities, it is personal choice, and he does it just as he chooses to,
it is something private which he shares only with friends, something he learns to do informally.
The attitude we have, often the school, towards this set of knowledge, and practices is one of disapproval and criticism.
This is not the best attitude for developing more global reading practices.
On the contrary, what we are doing at school is academic, imposed, there is no choice, it is public and, in short, and this is the most important idea,
the vernacular is related to the personal, with the construction of identity.
This is a very important idea, but it is a way of feeling more loved and loving ones closest circle of friends all the more.
On the other hand, academic practices, reading and writing practices at school, are closely linked to the institution.
Another important idea found in this socio-cultural approach is that the ways we have of reading and writing also change from community to community.
Carmen Pastor is currently writing a great thesis – well underway – about complaining in Germany and Spain.
Letters of complaint to language schools, because in Germany she had a lot of letters of complaint on language schools.
The basic difference is that, obviously, in Germany people complain a lot more. In Spain we complain less or we complain differently.
The Germans are extraordinarily direct. They say: I don’t agree with this, or that, or the other.
We find this totally aggressive, far to direct.
This is a good example to show how, given that we are looking at a world in which everyone is going to speak different languages,
the practice of acting in different communities where lettered practices work in a different way, will become more relevant.
That is why we also need a socio-cultural