Abstracts are invited for the 2024 LITASA conference which will take place in Cape Town from 13-15 September

Language and Literacy are acquired and stimulated optimally when language and literacy practices and skills are supported across contexts, namely: in homes, families, and communities, in children’s play, home-schooling, at school, and in post-schooling contexts. In their homes and communities children learn about the ways of talking, thinking and
behaving around texts which are valued and many other activities that form part of formal schooling and everyday life. Examples of these practices include informal reading, writing, art and performing arts. At school, teachers can draw on these - and other - practices to teach new skills. Engagement with language and literacy practices and skills does not need to stop after school has been completed as literacy practices and skills are also integral aspects of human development post-school. Literacy practices and skills are required and acquired at work and are part of a lifelong process of learning and of human and economic development. 

This conference looks beyond the binaries of literacy practices and skills, of languages and of settings. We invite submissions that discuss the different ways in which families and communities ‘do’ literacy and what this means for children as they move outside of their homes and local communities to participate in the wider, and sometimes very different, institutional literacy practices of other educational contexts. We invite submissions that explore the most effective literacy practices in schools. We hope these submissions can describe how early childhood specialists and school teachers can build on children’s existing literacies and support the transition children make as they adapt to new ways of doing literacy in different contexts. This capacity to adapt to new and different ways of doing literacy will also enable children to become citizens who can in time access the literacy practices which are part of the workplace, tertiary education, and other community institutions. Furthermore, the conference seeks to foster relationships and to show interdependence of the various contexts in developing literate communities. Finally, it also seeks to highlight
innovative research and initiatives at developing and sustaining engagements with literacy across these contexts.
 

Subthemes to be considered:

• Play as literacy development (digital games/gamification, musical games/game songs games and imaginative play, narrative play, story play, drama)

•  Literacy learning across contexts and activities

• Storytelling as literacy development

•  Skills and practices for literacy development

• Technology and literacy development

• Literacy development in the post schooling space

• The role of literacy in building relationships

• Expanding language and literacies repertoires

• Literacy development for social change

• Decolonising language and literacies practices