The literacy educator or researcher preparing to undertake research into their own practice, or into literacy education more broadly, will find a vast terrain of research literature to traverse. So it was with some apprehension that we embarked on the task of adding this title on the topic of literacy to the Research and Practice in Applied Linguistics series. Our brief from the series editors was to present ‘a concise historical and conceptual overview’ of the literacy field and to identify the ‘many lines of enquiry and findings, but also gaps and disagreements’ in the field. We  were to provide readers with ‘an overall framework for further examination of how research and practice inform each other, and how practitioners can develop their own problem-based research’. Importantly, for us, we were also ‘to ensure many, often, competing voices are heard’ (Candlin & Hall 2011: xii.). The extent to which we have met our brief will be for you the reader to judge. Capturing every important and  illuminating research and practice-based orientation to literacy and literacy education is clearly beyond the scope of one volume. Writing about  literacy, to adapt Firth’s famous words, is after all just turning literacy back on itself using constructs that are ‘neither immanent nor  transcendent’ (Firth 1951, cited in Butt, 2001: 1815).

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