Making the invisible more visible: Home literacy practices of middle-class and working-class families

Through interviews with eight families, the author found that the amount of literacy materials, nature of the materials and goals for using literacy differed between middleclass and working-class families. Yet, all the families in the study both explicitly and implicitly expressed value for literacy activities. The middle-class families drew on more resources to find out information about the child's classroom than did the working-class families. However, there were not major differences in the amount or nature of the knowledge that families had about their children's classrooms. This study challenges the popular myth that working-class families do not value literacy nor understand the nature of the activities in their children's classrooms.