In this chapter, the development of literacy competence is intended as a process of progressive
connection of the everyday writing repertoires with the more formal writing genre characteristic of
schooling, through students’ participation in innovative activities in the “third space” (Gutiérrez,
1993; 2008; Gutiérrez, Rhymes, & Larson, 1995). Moving from Jack Goody’s conceptualization of
writing as a “technology of intellect” (Goody, 1987; Olson, 1996), it is considered that young people
work out highly contextualized writing repertoires in their everyday life to achieve specific goals in
practice. These repertoires may differ from the literacy competencies required in school and this
divergence may produce in students from non-mainstream backgrounds an experience of “cultural
discontinuity” (Mehan, 1998) that, in turn, may be an element of school failure. To mediate the
development of appropriate literacy repertoires in multicultural schools, it is required the construction
of a “third space”, in which the existing everyday writing repertoires may be transformed to achieve
expressive and argumentative goals in social communication. The empirical basis for the analysis
derives from a school ethnography, conducted in a secondary school serving a student population of
recent immigration in Italy in a working-class town in Northern East Italy.
