Abstract

hile "family literacy" has been a popular term and concept in para-educational settings since the 1980s, it has o en focused on using home life to meet educational aims, rather than studying the family as a site of literate experiences in its own right.In their book Family Literacies: Reading with Young Children, Rachael Levy and Mell Hall intentionally move away from school-based aims for pre-and primary-school children to instead ask what families get from creating, sustaining, and sharing literacy experiences.ey explore a widely acknowledged, but surprisingly under-researched, family literacy practice: reading with young children.Levy and Hall frame what they call "shared reading" as a familial act that shapes routines, reinforces emotional bonds, and displays familial "belonging" both to family members and outsiders.Focusing on children who have not yet started school allows them to explore "shared reading" as a separate activity from "learning to read, " though their ndings have major implications for both preschool community literacy programs and, potentially, primary classrooms.e book draws on ndings from the Shared Reading Project, which interviews families to understand how shared reading "is perceived in their homes and how it ts (or does not t) within everyday family life" (13).Levy and Hall's ndings stress the importance of understanding the habits and goals of individual families, in order to create programming that supports ongoing literacy practices rather than promoting school readiness.Demonstrating the di erence in ndings that a shi in focus can yield, the authors examine families and homes, rather than programs, until they discuss implications in the book's nal chapters.e authors use theory and methods from sociology to study shared reading as a feature of everyday life, asking what the activity achieves for families and making reading a means to an end, rather than a goal.e book is clearly laid out in ten chapters: an introduction to gaps in family reading research, two chapters reviewing relevant work on reading as a sociological