While current technological changes and related changes in social practices beyond the school are now forcing us to challenge some of our conventional assumptions about literacy, another challenge to long-held beliefs about literacy has been developing within literacy theory since the 1960s and 70s. This is what has become known as a 'sociocultural approach' to literacy.
' Traditionally, literacy has been thought of 'as a largely psychological ability - something true about our heads' (Gee, Hull & Lankshear 1996: 1). That is, to become literate is to have something done to our brains, so that we achieve a special kind of cognitive 'faculty' or inner capacity. This view reflects the domination of psychology in educational theory and research throughout this century. Being literate has been seen as a matter of cracking the alphabetic code, word-formation skills, phonics, grammar, and comprehension skills. According to this view, encoding and decoding skills serve as building blocks for doing other things and for accessing meanings. For instance, once people are literate, they can get on with learning through the medium of texts - by studying subjects in a curriculum, or by other print-mediated means. When people are literate, they can use 'it' (the skill repertoire, the ability) as a 'tool' to pursue all sorts of 'goods' (employment, knowledge, recreational pleasure, personal development, economic growth, innovation). But to 'get literate' in the first place is seen from this perspective as a matter of inserting the necessary skills into people's heads. There are debates about how best to achieve this (for example, phonics, letter recognition, 'letter chunking'), but those debating the most effective way all share the idea of literacy as basically a 'head thing', a psychological ability.

By contrast, understanding literacy as sociocultural practice