ABSTRACT
Just as scholars in dialogic pedagogy, following Vygotsky (1978), view language as a tool for thought, scholars in literacy view language as a tool for “literate thinking.” Langer (1987) used the term “literate thinking” to refer to those activities a person might engage in “to think and reason like a literate person” (p. 2). Her focus was not so much on the skills of reading and writing per se, but on the thinking and talking about text, broadly defined, that accompanies those literacy activities. For Langer, when a group of people read a novel or see a movie and discuss the theme, plot, or characters, they are engaging in literate thinking. Wells (1989), borrowing Langer’s term, defined literate thinking even more broadly as “all those uses of language in which its symbolic potential is deliberately exploited as a tool for thinking” (p. 253). For Wells, the epitome of literate thinking is engaging with text in an epistemic mode, to interrogate the text to explore its meaning and possible interpretations (Chang-Wells & Wells, 1993).
