• Literacy is best understood as a social practice and cultural meaning embedded in everyday events; narratives and bedtime reading encode community values and power relations, challenging simple autonomous skill models across communities [1], [20], [12], [13].

• Language development and literacy co-emerge in early childhood through caregiver–child interaction, semantic contingency, scaffolding, and routines; reading and writing arise from talk and daily routines in family and classroom contexts [4], [3], [5], [7].

• Critical literacy examines how literacy encodes social power and identity, showing how race, ideology, and class shape what counts as literacy in schools and communities through recontextualization of literacy events [9], [17], [18], [2].

• Pedagogical reform and classroom practice debates—whole language, emergent literacy, and mobilization of literacy campaigns—reflect different theoretical frameworks driving instructional change and policy orientation [8], [11], [2], [6].

• Historical and cross-population perspectives trace literacy development over time and across populations, highlighting trajectories, legacies, and demographic patterns in literacy outcomes [13], [15], [14], [19].