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This paper deals with the following questions: 1. The 'problem': what is the 'Literacy Debate' and why do such apparently arcane accounts of language and literacy have such a high profile in popular media? 2. What are the New Literacy Studies (NLS) and what are the new understandings of language and of literacy on which NLS are based? 3. What are the implications for literacy education? Key wordsLiteracy, language education, social literacies, literacy research The Literacy DebateMy 'problem' stems from the anthropological observation that a visiting Martian might be surprised at the extent to which arcane debates about literacy, language and learning appear in the public domain in contemporary British and American society. Popular newspapers and tabloids as well as the 'quality' press, and also television and radio seem full of accounts by 'experts' of their own piece of the struggle over the meanings of literacy and in particular the acquisition of literacy: phonics vs whole language, code-based vs meaning-based reading, cognitive and situated models of literacy; student-centred vs. whole-class teaching. Although my own interest has mainly been in the uses, rather than the acquisition of literacy, and my own part in the debate has been about social practices associated with reading and writing, rather than psycholinguistic conflicts over the graphemelphoneme relationship, I am intrigued by the way in which these debates have taken on a social character of their own. Those in other niches of the intellectual horizon may go a lifetime without their debates splashed across full-page spreads of

We study multi-parameter Carnot-Carathéodory balls, generalizing results due to Nagel, Stein and Wainger in the single parameter setting. The main technical result is seen as a uniform version of the theorem of Frobenius. In addition, we study maximal functions associated to certain multi-parameter families of Carnot-Carathéodory balls.