Investigating literacy practices within the secondary English classroom, or where is the text in this class?

The Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development has been interpreted in such a way as to provide theoretical support for particular, government-sponsored, models of both pedagogy and literacy. This article proposes a radically different interpretation of the ZPD, informed by Bakhtinian understandings of heteroglossia. This alternative model is then used to describe and interpret the pedagogic and literacy practices that are observed in a secondary English lesson, in which students deploy a wide range of cultural and multimodal resources to make sense of a complex text