LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND POWER IN SCHOOLING. Teresa L. McCarty (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xxvi + 317. $34.50 paper.

The ways in which macro factors of global socioeconomic power shape micro language/literacy interactions in education have increasingly gained attention in applied linguistics research. This volume, which emerged from an American Anthropological Association symposium in 1999, sets out to examine this dialectic through the lens of critical ethnographic research. In her introduction, McCarty draws on the new literacy studies paradigm to challenge dichotomizing discourses—oral versus literate, literate versus illiterate, monolingual versus bilingual—as well as current calls for standardization, homogeneity, and universalist approaches to language and literacy education. Instead, the editor situates the volume within a social practices framework, which emphasizes the multiplicity and variability of literacy practices shaped by context, power, culture, and purpose.