Literacy development across age groups
- Submission status
- Open
- Submission deadline
Literacy is a lifelong, socially embedded process that evolves as individuals move through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and later life. Far from being a fixed skill acquired in early schooling, literacy is shaped by cognitive development, educational opportunity, cultural context, digital environments, and the shifting demands of work, citizenship, and everyday communication. As societies become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, multilingual interaction, and complex information ecosystems, understanding how literacy develops across age groups has become an urgent interdisciplinary challenge.
These transformations raise fundamental questions about equity, access, identity, and the cultural and political conditions that enable people to participate fully in contemporary life.
This Collection invites scholarship that examines literacy development as a dynamic, age‑spanning phenomenon. We welcome contributions from across the humanities and social sciences, including education studies, linguistics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, disability studies, gerontology, and related fields. We particularly encourage work that foregrounds diverse populations, cross‑cultural perspectives, and the lived experiences of learners at different life stages.
We invite papers that engage with topics including (but not limited to):
- Early childhood literacy - emergent reading and writing; language exposure; play‑based learning; home literacy environments
- Adolescent literacy - identity formation; multimodal communication; digital and social media literacies; peer cultures
- Adult literacy - workplace literacies; community education; migration and multilingualism; literacy and social mobility
- Later‑life literacy - cognitive change; digital inclusion; health literacy; ageing and access to information
- Digital and multimodal literacies - algorithmic environments; platform cultures; AI‑mediated communication; critical digital literacy
- Equity and inclusion - disability and accessibility; socio‑economic disparities; linguistic rights; culturally sustaining pedagogies
- Policy and institutional contexts - curriculum design; assessment regimes; public policy; global and comparative perspectives
- Methodological innovation - ethnography, longitudinal studies, corpus analysis, participatory research, and mixed‑methods approaches
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary submissions, research that centres marginalised or under‑represented communities, and work that challenges conventional assumptions about what literacy is, how it develops, and who is recognised as a literate subject. By bringing together diverse perspectives, this Collection aims to deepen understanding of literacy as a lifelong, culturally situated practice and to illuminate the social, political, and technological forces that shape learning across the lifespan.
