I have shown how literacy is much more than reading and writing and how it is intertwined not only with education, but also health and social welfare. In the interactive model, this is illustrated by the triangle crossing into the outer circle which includes a place for the social conditions mentioned. All children should have the opportunity to be exposed to a variety of discourses in order to learn more about themselves and the world. However, children who lack the literacy skills that mainstream children learn as a matter of course in their habitus and social environments are not only at a disadvantage because of their lack of facility with these skills but they seldom get to use the literacy skills that they possess.

In other words, low–income children will have more difficulty when there is a mismatch between the literacy skills learned in formal schooled literacy and the literate ways that they have been shown at home. Furthermore, what this model suggests is that those working in the literacy field should carefully examine the gate–keeping role in how mastery is defined. Hence, researchers should also work on defining what mastery means since mastery will result in the accumulation of cultural capital. If by mastery, we refer only to what is commonly considered print literacy or skills–based literacies, which Kelly (1997) describes as "texts that must be decoded by skillful readers" then we negate the "cultural subject/body of literacy, that body constituted in and of literacy practices" (p. 75).

In Kelly's opinion, what is needed is a shift towards multiple literacies that go beyond a skills-based approach to consider sociocultural contexts, including those of popular culture and multimedia, in order "to move along with print into broadened notions of what it means to read and what it is that can be read" (p. 81). What is needed then is literacy that builds upon the skills already attained not only to improve the functional literacy of the individual within particular technologies but to expand the boundaries of literacy itself through multiple literacies that encourage "a wider expanse of identities as expressions of human possibility and meaningful difference" (p. 116).