This paper looks at some issues around "learning to read" from the viewpoint of a social practice concept of literacy for both child and adult literacy. This calls for an ethnographic approach that, although increasingly common in the field of adult literacy, is less common in the policy and practice of schooling; there, a more decontextualized approach predominates, seeing one form of literacy as a universal norm to which all adult literacy learning needs to conform. And--on the whole--in literacy education, schooling predominates, although there are signs in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of increasing awareness of the importance of a wider approach to adult learning for the achievement of the SDGs. This will increase the need for an ethnographic approach to both children's and adults' literacy-learning programmes.