ABSTRACT
In this chapter I discuss how we as an adult community, concerned with supporting children’s learning, define, use and understand what literacy is, and what it looks like in the early years. Attention is paid to the impact of digital technologies on early literacy development, the tensions between school assessment and everyday reading practices as well as the disconnection between literacy in formal and informal contexts in relation to children’s writing. The key challenges brought about by technology to traditional forms of literacy result in a proposed redefinition of what we mean by reading and writing in the twenty-first century.
