READING AND RETHINKING: THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF READING AND READERS IN RESEARCH INTERVIEWS WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS

Recent research suggests the need to study how literacy and social in/equality are produced in social interaction. This dissertation focuses on the cultural production of “reading ” and “readers ” as one aspect of the cultural production of literacy. Using theories of cultural production, socio-cultural and socio-linguistic theories of literacy and ethnomethodological analyses of talk, this study examines the ways that parents, teachers and a teacher-librarian-researcher produce the construct “reading”, the category “readers” and social in/equality in the context of “research interviews ” for a “university study on literacy”. The analysis presented here suggests that the participants co-constructed reading in a variety of ways. The most common method for producing or constructing reading was to “gloss ” reading or to treat it as self-explanatory. A small portion of the data produced reading via alternative constructions including treating reading as a “puzzle”. Analysis suggests this data can tell us more about the institutions of schooling, research and “the interview ” than it can about participants ’ literacy practices. In addition, this analysis suggests that participants produced social relations and values in an