Sam Duncan is an adult literacy researcher and teacher educator at the UCL Institute of Education. She has a background in adult literacy and community education and teaches on a range of education, literacy and research-related modules. Sam is the author of Reading Circles, Novels and Adult Reading Development (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Reading for Pleasure and Reading Circles for Adult Emergent Readers (NIACE, 2014). She has just completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellowship to research contemporary adult reading aloud practices across Britain.

'Oral Literacies is a rich exploration of the complex nature of reading and writing as mobile, embodied, and multimodal. Duncan provides both detailed documentation and nuanced analysis of the wide range of social practices involved in reading aloud that are too often overlooked in literacy research. She complicates the seeming paradox of the concepts in the title to demonstrate the interanimating relationships of speech and text across daily life.'Bronwyn T. Williams, University of Louisville, USA

• List of illustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgementsChapter 1 IntroductionPart 1Chapter 2 The Reading Aloud in Britain Today (RABiT) projectChapter 3 The questionnaire: Surveying contemporary reading aloudChapter 4 Mass ObservationChapter 5 The interviews and recordings Part 2Chapter 6 Family, friends and lovers: Community, domesticity, intimacy and mediationChapter 7 Working lifeChapter 8 ReligionChapter 9 Literary life: Production, performance, experience and the WordhordChapter 10 Solitude: Aloud aloneChapter 11 Oral reading and educationChapter 12 ConclusionIndex

Sam Duncan is an adult literacy researcher and teacher educator at the UCL Institute of Education. She has a background in adult literacy and community education and teaches on a range of education, literacy and research-related modules. Sam is the author of Reading Circles, Novels and Adult Reading Development (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Reading for Pleasure and Reading Circles for Adult Emergent Readers (NIACE, 2014). She has just completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellowship to research contemporary adult reading aloud practices across Britain.

'Oral Literacies is a rich exploration of the complex nature of reading and writing as mobile, embodied, and multimodal. Duncan provides both detailed documentation and nuanced analysis of the wide range of social practices involved in reading aloud that are too often overlooked in literacy research. She complicates the seeming paradox of the concepts in the title to demonstrate the interanimating relationships of speech and text across daily life.'Bronwyn T. Williams, University of Louisville, USA

• List of illustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgementsChapter 1 IntroductionPart 1Chapter 2 The Reading Aloud in Britain Today (RABiT) projectChapter 3 The questionnaire: Surveying contemporary reading aloudChapter 4 Mass ObservationChapter 5 The interviews and recordings Part 2Chapter 6 Family, friends and lovers: Community, domesticity, intimacy and mediationChapter 7 Working lifeChapter 8 ReligionChapter 9 Literary life: Production, performance, experience and the WordhordChapter 10 Solitude: Aloud aloneChapter 11 Oral reading and educationChapter 12 ConclusionIndex