© Langage et société n° 133 – septembre 2010 Literacy mediators, scribes or brokers ? The central role of others in accomplishing reading and writing Uta Papen Literacy Research Centre, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University u.papen@lancaster.ac.uk Introduction The term literacy mediators is widely used in research associated with the New Literacy Studies (NLS, see for example Barton 2007, Street 1993 and 2001, Papen 2005a), now a major trend in reading and writing research in the Anglophone world and beyond. Literacy mediators are people who read and write for somebody else. Such mediators are frequently referred to in studies exploring reading and writing in people’s everyday life (see for exam- ple Barton and Hamilton 1998, Kalman 1999, Jones 2000, Mace 2002). The NLS conceptualises literacy as a social practice, as activities that are part and parcel of people’s life world and that are patterned not only by individual skills, but by cultural norms, social relations and the wider context of people’s lives. As such, the NLS provides a counterdiscourse to the view of literacy as individual skill, common in educational research, policy and practice. Once researchers look beyond the individual and into the larger context of when and how literacy is used in social life, the role of others in accomplishing acts of reading and writing is easily recognised. In this article, I present examples of literacy mediation from my own research in Namibia. The discussion of these and other examples from the research literature seeks to clarify the meanings of terms such as literacy mediation, scribing and brokering which have been used by researchers to capture dif- ferent practices of reading and writing for or with others. Literacy mediators