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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This introduction to the expanding field of literacy studies has been fully revised for the second edition. It explores recent developments and new research that has contributed to our understanding of literacy practices, reflecting on the interdisciplinary growth of the study of reading and writing over the past decade.
An introductory textbook on the growing field of literacy studies, fully updated for the new edition
Includes new sections detailing recent completed studies of literacy practices, and the use of new technologies
Distinguishes between the competing definitions of literacy in contemporary society, and examines the language and learning theories which underpin new views of literacy
Now features additional material on cross-cultural perspectives, US-based examples, and information detailing current educational policy.
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Seitenzahl: 505
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Preface
Preface to the first edition
1 An integrated approach to literacy
Introduction
Literacy in everyday life
The study of literacy
Outline of the book
2 Talking about literacy
Metaphors for literacy
Theories and metaphors
Definitions of literacy
Literacy studies
3 The social basis of literacy
Practices and events
Literacies and domains
Broader social relations
Literacy as communication
Literacy as thought
Values and awareness
Individual history
Social history
4 Researching literacy practices
Researching literacy as social practice
Research methods
Local and community literacy practices
Multilingual literacy practices
Literacy is gendered
Workplace literacy practices
The social patterning of literacy practices
5 Literacy embedded in language
Literacy and language
Taking meaning from texts
Language mediates
6 Configurations of language
Written and spoken language are different
Continua from written to spoken
Configurations of language
Decontextualized and explicit?
7 Writing systems and other notations
Writing systems
Other notations
8 Points in history
Introduction
The archaeology of literacy
Literacy and historical change
A social history of literacy
9 The roots of literacy
Introduction
Approaches to learning
Learning to speak
10 Emergent literacy
Reading to children
Literacy events
Writing
Knowing about literacy
11 Public definitions of literacy
The skill of reading
Writer as scribe and as author
The literary view of literacy
The professional writer
12 School practices
Introduction
What goes on in schools
Literacy as language
13 Adults and world literacy
Introduction
Functional literacy
Industrialized countries
Not literate in a literate world
Language issues in adult literacy
14 Some implications of an ecological view
Literacy in education
Global literacy
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
2 Talking about literacy
Table 2.1 Some ways of talking about literacy
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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e1
Literacy
An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language
Second Edition
David Barton
© 2007 by David Barton
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
The right of David Barton to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First edition published 1994 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd
Second edition published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barton, David, 1949–
Literacy : an introduction to the ecology of written language / David Barton. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1114-0 (hardback)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1114-3 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1143-0 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1143-7 (pbk.)
1. Literacy. 2. Reading. 3. Composition (Language arts) 4. Linguistics. I. Title.
LC149.B28 2007
302.2′244—dc22
2006026292
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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Preface
This book is intended as an introduction to literacy studies for students and for general readers. It is also aimed at specialists in one area of study who wish to understand the significance of literacy studies for their own work. The book explores competing definitions of literacy in contemporary society and examines the theories of language and learning which underpin new views of literacy. It also aims to provide a coherent view of literacy which can act as an antidote to the narrow technical views of reading and writing which are common in much public discussion, in the media and in political speeches.
This updated second edition brings together recent developments in a coherent manner, by showing how new research has contributed to our understanding of literacy. Since the publication of the first edition there have been many detailed studies of literacy practices in different settings. This new edition contains summaries of this research and provides extensive references to further research. There is also a section devoted to how literacy research is carried out.
There is now an international network of researchers contributing to the field of literacy studies and I am grateful to the many people I have talked to and corresponded with over the past decade, especially those who have organized seminars and conferences. The field has been taking great strides forward and this progress has been conducted in a collaborative and friendly way across many international boundaries. I owe particular thanks to the members of the Literacy Research Centre at Lancaster University, who have contributed to my thinking immensely, especially Yvon Appleby, Mary Hamilton, Rachel Hodge, Roz Ivanic, Karin Tusting, Uta Papen and Anita Wilson. Karin Tusting has helped in the development of this second edition in detailed ways, especially in contributing to the parts on workplace literacies and on new technologies; equally importantly she has suggested sections to shorten and has tried to keep me to a timetable for finishing this work. Of course I take full responsibility for the gaps when trying to keep up to date with this rapidly expanding field.
David Barton Lancaster University April 2006
Preface to the first edition
I mistakenly thought that writing an introductory text would be a simple and straightforward task; I assumed that simple to read meant simple to write. As I became more and more immersed in my project, I came to realize how wrong I had been and how difficult it is to be simple. I hope I have succeeded.
This book does several seemingly incompatible things at once. First, it is intended as an introduction to the growing field of Literacy Studies, accessible to the interested general reader as well as to the beginning student. It is also aimed at the specialist in one area of the field who wishes to have an up-to-date introduction to other related areas. Finally, I want to contribute to current discussions of literacy by articulating a coherent view of literacy, as an alternative to the narrowly technical views of reading and writing which are common in much public discussion, in the media and in political speeches, as well as in some areas of education and research.
There are several ways to read this book. It is possible to start at the beginning and read straight through to the end; alternatively, many of the chapters can be read independently: feel free to jump about and miss chapters out. To make the text easier to read I have put many of the references and extra examples into notes at the end, so a more detailed reading is also possible, with one finger in the endnotes.
I am conscious of my use of language. I do not use the supposedly generic personal pronouns he and she. As you can see, I am happy to use the word I in recognition of my self in writing. I use the word we but in several ways, so be aware of whether you are included when I use it, or whether I am drawing you along unwillingly with me. I try not to use wewhen I mean I! I am probably inconsistent in my use of tense, sometimes being in the past, sometimes the present and sometimes the future. My use of people’s full names is erratic – I hope it is not gendered. While it is probably inevitable that thinking about literacy makes one reflective about one’s own writing, I will avoid the temptation here to write pages about my own literacy practices, and about how I wrote this book; I will save that indulgence for another occasion.
I acknowledge the influence of many people. I am grateful to Charles Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath for letting me realize many years ago that I did not have to measure spectrograms for ever and that literacy is a reasonable interest to pursue. Since that time, in the past decade I have talked to many people about literacy at meetings and conferences in Europe and North America. I owe a debt to all of them, especially Michael Cole, David Olson and Catherine Snow. Many colleagues who are also friends have contributed: including Brian Street, who has always been extremely generous in his support; Mukul Saxena and Mary Talbot, who commented on parts of the manuscript of this book; Kenneth Levine, who updated the table in chapter 2 for me; and especially David Bloome, Mary Hamilton, Roz Ivanic, Janet Maybin and Catherine Macrae who took the time to provide me with many detailed comments on the whole enterprise.
At Lancaster I have been grateful for support from colleagues in the Centre for Language in Social Life, and especially to staff and students who have participated in the activities of the Literacy Research Group over the years, including Rachel Rimmershaw, Sarah Padmore and Simon Pardoe. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Linguistics for maintaining a sabbatical system which encourages people to take time off for writing and research, despite external pressures to constantly reduce this time. Above all, the endless discussions with and enthusiasm from Mary Hamilton and Roz Ivanic have contributed much to this book. Of course I take responsibility for all errors, omissions, confusions and lack of clarity which remain. Meanwhile, I have learned a great deal.
David Barton Lancaster University 1994
1An integrated approach to literacy
Introduction
Literacy in everyday life
.
The study of literacy
Outline of the book
Introduction
Rapid technological and social change is affecting what we know and how we communicate. The nature of knowledge and the nature of communication are changing in fundamental ways, and literacy is central to this. Throughout the world, issues of literacy have moved to the top of the political agenda and in public debate everywhere there is perceived to be a crisis in education; literacy has become a contentious issue in schools and colleges, in the community and in political debate.
More than one hundred years after the introduction of compulsory schooling we do not have an educational system which turns out happy well-educated people. This can be demonstrated in many ways; with reference to reading and writing, it is generally agreed that around 10 per cent of adults in countries like Britain and the United States are not satisfied with their levels of literacy. After three decades of adult literacy provision in such countries, what was thought of as a minor social problem has not been solved; rather, basic education provision for adults now has to be seen as part of normal educational provision. Pressures are coming from governments and elsewhere for education to account for what it achieves and there are new demands from rapidly changing technologies. This is happening throughout industrialized countries. Meanwhile, in developing countries there is a realization that literacy rates are not increasing in the ways optimistically predicted before the year 2000 and there are debates on how to achieve ‘education for all’.
Competing views of what education is for are being made more explicit. People may disagree about the nature of ‘the crisis’ but there is public unease about what is going on. The purpose of schools and education has often been taken for granted: more and more it is now being called into question. Questions about reading and writing turn up in a wide range of places: in discussions about falling standards in education; in calls for Plain English in documents; in debates about the economic cost of education, the requirements for a trained workforce, the effects of new technologies on our lives, the need for adult literacy provision.
All sorts of people talk about literacy and make assumptions about it, both within education and beyond it. The business manager bemoans the lack of literacy skills in the workforce. The politician wants to eradicate ‘the scourge of illiteracy’. The radical educator attempts to empower and liberate people. The literary critic sorts the good writers from the bad writers. The teacher diagnoses reading difficulties and prescribes a programme to solve them. The pre-school teacher watches literacy emerge. These people all have powerful definitions of what literacy is. They have different theories of literacy, different ideas of ‘the problem’ and what should be done about it. Public discussion in the media is often at odds with what is going on in schools. Ideas about a ‘literacy crisis’ are constantly in the newspapers but public discussion of literacy issues is not very sophisticated; there is widespread ignorance about language, and the most simplistic approaches are latched on to.
Part of this current conflict revolves around what is meant by literacy and to some extent the disputes can be viewed as struggles between different definitions of literacy. The aim of this book is to try to understand the different ways in which people talk about reading and writing, and to draw together new views of literacy which have been developed in different areas. The question I am asking throughout is: what is literacy? In exploring this topic, I will cover many very different aspects of literacy. There are two starting points for the discussion: first, that of examining people’s everyday reading and writing; and, secondly, the many areas of study which are contributing to new understandings of literacy.
Literacy in everyday life
The first starting point is people’s everyday lives and how they make use of reading and writing. In going about their ordinary daily life, people today are constantly encountering literacy. This is true for most people in the world. Imagine a person waking up in the morning: they may well be woken up at seven o’clock in the morning by an alarm which turns on a radio automatically. The first voice they hear might well be someone reading the radio news to them, a written text which is being spoken. Going for breakfast, they pick up the newspaper from the door mat along with some mail. Breakfast, in England at least, might consist of drinking a cup of tea while listening to the radio, browsing through the newspaper and opening some letters. Other people might be present, adults and children, and they might participate in these activities. Already, at the beginning of the day, there have been several literacy events, each quite different from the other.
I have used this example elsewhere; I like it because it demonstrates that how people use literacy is tied up with the particular details of the situation and that literacy events are particular to a specific community at a specific point in history. The scene I describe may be very familiar to you or it may seem very distant. The precise details may not be right: there are many countries today where mail and newspapers are not delivered to the door in time for breakfast. I was thinking of Lancaster, England; in seemingly similar places such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania or Lancaster, Ontario things may be very different. It is only in some cultures that it is thought normal to start the day sitting at a table and simultaneously to listen to a radio, read a newspaper and drink a cup of tea, and where it may be acceptable and polite to ignore other people eating at the table, or to talk intermittently to them while reading. What is polite or acceptable in one situation may not be in another, and such behaviour might not be accepted at a different time of day or with different people present.
There are several other things about literacy which this example illustrates. The first point to be made is that literacy impinges on people in their daily lives, whether or not they regularly read books or do much writing. Literacy is embedded in these activities of ordinary life. It is not something which is done just at school or at work. It is carried out in a wide variety of settings. For the school child much of the literacy in the home may be quite unlike that encountered in the school classroom. Secondly, several people can be involved in reading or in writing, and they may participate in various ways, each treating the written word differently. There are many ways of reading in a particular situation with a particular text. The various texts are recognized as distinct and are read in different ways – there are many ways of taking meaning from the text. Listening to the news broadcasts, scanning the morning papers, sorting through the different letters in the mail may all involve different participants acting in different ways.
This example has been concerned with reading, but there may well be some writing involved. Around breakfast time there may be a hurried letter to be written to the teacher, or a school form to be filled in. There may be a note to be left for someone, or a bill which has to be paid urgently. People write reminder notes for themselves at the beginning of the day and write in diaries and on calendars. Some people get up early to write personal letters or log on to their email before the bustle of the day begins.
Using an everyday event as a starting point provides a distinct view of literacy. The most common views of literacy start out from the educational settings in which literacy is typically taught, that is, the school classroom. The dominant definitions in society, then, are school-based definitions of literacy. These views of what literacy is are often at odds with what people experience in their everyday lives. This can be in a very straightforward way where the kinds of reading and writing which people do in their everyday lives are different from those done in school. It can be in people’s more general conceptions of literacy. Everyday literacy gives a richer view of literacy which demands a new definition of literacy, a new way of thinking about what is involved in reading and writing.
The main area for research on reading and writing up till now has been education. The main focus has been on individual learning. The main research paradigm has been psychological. Again this has been the most common approach. However, it is not just educators who are interested in literacy. If we look elsewhere, it is obvious that the more we dig at literacy, the richer it is. A wealth of recent ideas which are not encompassed by standard theories flood in from history, anthropology, sociology and a range of other disciplines. These ideas provide the second starting point for the exploration of literacy.
The study of literacy
There are many aspects of literacy to account for. Across a wide range of disciplines there has been an explosion of interest in literacy. Topics which were not mentioned a few years ago are now being researched and there is so much work going on that it is difficult to keep up with the books and articles which are being published. There are many strands of research taking the subject in different directions. It is necessary to bring these strands together, and much of this book will be devoted to doing this. To give an idea of what is ahead here is a brief list of some of the areas where there has been renewed interest in literacy and where we might look for ideas. The individual people working in these areas are moving in the same direction and I want to point to the unity of ideas in these seemingly diverse topics.
Across a range of disciplines the term literacy has become a code word for more complex views of what is involved in reading and writing. In each of the following subjects, people are making some contribution to the contemporary study of literacy:
historical development
the study of different cultures and subcultures
oral cultures without literacy
languages, scripts, bilingual literacy
written and spoken language
situated cognition
social understanding of science and of new technologies
processes of reading and writing
pre-school literacy, emergent literacy
learning in schools
learning at home, in the community, at work
adult learning, adult literacy, adults returning to study
the politics of literacy, literacy and power
These are the topics I will be drawing upon throughout the book. I will provide references to work in these areas as they are encountered. In all these areas people are questioning what is meant by literacy. Although there are similarities, in some ways these different approaches with different philosophies underlying them are asking different questions and using different methodologies. There needs to be a way of talking about literacy which begins to bring together the many facets described so far. I will provide an overview of current approaches to literacy in these different areas at the same time as ensuring that they contribute to a common understanding of reading and writing. This is a complex interdisciplinary endeavour and I hope that the idea of an ecological approach, the subject of the next two chapters, will provide enough common threads to weave the topics together.
At different points in history disciplines go forward at different rates; in the past two decades the pace of change in the study of reading and writing has been rapid and the new field of literacy studies has come into existence. It is important to realize that there has been a significant paradigm shift going on in this area. It is exhibited in various ways, one of the most visible being the explosion of books, papers and conferences on the subject. The shift is in a particular direction. Many of the recent works I will refer to begin with summaries of changes in views and they are all shifts to some social perspective.
Another phenomenon is the plethora of reviews, reviews of reviews, special issues of journals and conferences devoted to the topic of literacy, each beginning with a discussion of what is meant by the word. There are even whole books devoted to defining literacy (such as Venezky et al., 1990). Writers, including myself, see the need to examine the metaphors and theories we are starting from. One way of going forward has been to regard the taken-for-granted ideas as myths, to list the myths associated with aspects of literacy and then to counter them.1 While there has undeniably been a paradigm shift in the study of reading and writing, these changes are also part of more general trends in the social sciences of being more reflexive, focusing on the particular, and of being interdisciplinary. Like other shifts, this one is also leading to conflicting ways of talking about the topic and struggles over the meanings of words. A major goal of the book is to destroy common myths and widely accepted but wrong ‘truths’ about reading and writing, in order to build a different view. This will be evident in each of the topics covered.
Outline of the book
Chapter 2 is concerned with the need for a new way of thinking about reading and writing. It examines some of the metaphors which have been used when talking about literacy. Having outlined what is meant by a theory and the importance of metaphors in language, it explores some of the different ways of talking about literacy, including everyday usage, and how these metaphors are theories of literacy. Definitions of literacy from politicians, researchers and dictionaries are examined. The area of literacy studies is introduced and a final section discusses the metaphor of ecology and its potential application to the area of literacy.
Chapter 3 is an overview of what it means to think in terms of the ecology of literacy, arguing that literacy is best understood as a set of practices which people use in literacy events; that it is necessary to talk in terms of there being different literacies; that literacy practices are situated in broader social relations; that literacy is a symbolic system used both for communicating with others and for representing the world to ourselves; that attitudes and awareness are important aspects of literacy; that issues of power are important; and that current literacy events and practices are created out of the past.
Chapter 4 is about researching literacy practices. It describes methods for researching literacy practices and provides examples of research which has been carried out into everyday literacy practices. It then discusses several examples of multilingual literacy practices, then the ways in which all aspects of literacy are gendered, and finally examples of research into workplace literacy practices.
Chapter 5 explores contemporary ideas about language which are necessary for a sophisticated view of literacy. It provides a constructivist view of language, and it emphasizes the various discourses which different literacies are part of. Writing results in texts, which can be used, analysed and dissected, and they are connected to each other by intertextuality. Several examples of texts are used as illustrations in the book. The idea of reading as taking meaning from texts is covered. Finally, the various senses in which language, and especially literacy, mediates our experience are described.
Chapter 6 covers views on differences between written and spoken language, and how they have developed from ideas of listing differences, through notions of continua from written to spoken, on to ideas of configurations of language which utilize both written and spoken. Chapter 7 includes a brief description of different writing systems and some of the difficulties in making comparisons between them, and a discussion of writing in relation to other notations such as number, music, maps and visual layout. This is linked to the general discussion throughout on the limits of literacy.
Chapter 8 examines some crucial points in history and how they can provide insights into areas as diverse as: the learning of literacy, levels of literacy in society, literacy and technological change, and literacy and power relations. The first part, the archaeology of literacy, looks at the origin of writing, how it arose out of earlier systems, its relationship to social structure, and the wide range of functions existing from the beginning. Issues around the importance of early Greek literacy are covered, along with discussion of problems with the idea of writing evolving. A section on the social history of literacy looks at the importance of the development of printing in changing social practices, and the gradual development of a literate culture. The historical basis of contemporary literacy is covered through an examination of popular literacy and the introduction of compulsory schooling.
Chapters 9 and 10 turn to young children and the learning of literacy. As well as having ideas about language embedded in them, views of literacy also contain theories of learning. The roots of literacy are identified in learning to speak and in the practices associated with home literacy events. Views of learning which cover both written and spoken language are drawn upon. Emergent reading and writing are covered, along with the importance of children’s developing awareness of language.
Chapter 11 explores two metaphors common in public discussion about reading and writing and in education: these are, first, ideas about literacy being a skill and, secondly, literary views of reading and writing. This includes discussion of how professional writers, mainly novelists, talk about the act of writing. What goes on in schools, the actual literacy practices, are the subject of chapter 12. School practices are described in brief, along with some of the ways in which schools as institutions sustain certain views of literacy. Some of the research on links between home and school is covered.
The next chapter, chapter 13, turns to adult literacy, covering literacy campaigns in developing countries as well as recent questions raised in industrialized countries. It includes a section on how ordinary people, especially those who identify problems with reading and writing, negotiate their day-to-day lives. The values and purposes underlying literacy campaigns are discussed. The ecological fact that languages are currently dying out at a phenomenal rate is pointed out, along with some discussion of the role of literacy in supporting endangered languages. In the final chapter some suggestions are made of how schools and adult literacy programmes can take account of these views of literacy, and some directions are suggested for developing an ecological view of literacy.
2Talking about literacy
Metaphors for literacy
Theories and metaphors
Metaphors and thinking
Definitions of literacy
Literacy studies
Looking for a metaphor
The ecological metaphor
Metaphors for literacy
Like a germ that learns to enjoy penicillin, illiteracy consumes all the armies sent to fight it. No matter what we do about it – and we do a good deal, contrary to complaints from the literacy lobby – the condition persists. Depending on how you count them, adult illiterates make up anywhere from a tenth to a fifth of the Canadian population. We have no reason to think their number is shrinking, and some reason to fear that it is growing … social evil … illiteracy is caused … The remedy …
The metaphors are clear in this leader from the Financial Times of Canada on 4 July 1988. Ideas of disease and warfare come over in every word. The author of this emotive writing, Robert Fulford, then went on to make some interesting points about the illiteracy of the ghostwriting of speeches for politicians, thus stretching the term in a different direction.
Such metaphors are common in the media and in public discussion. In an interview on television the then Archbishop of Canterbury argued that the inner-city riots in Britain in 1991 were due to ‘a matrix of illiteracy and delinquency and other wrongdoing’. Around the same time a leading British politician referred to a situation where there was ‘not a high level of literacy so people were excitable and likely to be led astray’. Again the metaphors are clear, and especially revealing if you observe how literacy is juxtaposed with other negative terms suggesting weakness and crime.
The disease metaphor particularly is very pervasive. It can be used to damn the illiterate, as in the examples above, or it can be used to praise the literate. An example of the latter is to be found in Bruce Chatwin’s novel Utz; referring to Prague in the mid-twentieth century, the narrator comments: ‘The Soviet education system, I felt, had worked all too well: having created on a colossal scale, a generation of highly intelligent, highly literate young people who were more or less immune to the totalitarian message’ (1988, p. 118). There is a great deal on literacy to draw out of this quote and I will return to it later on. For the moment, the idea that literacy is an inoculation, making one immune to brain-washing, is a further example of the disease metaphor.
Talking about a disease which has to be eradicated is also a common way in which literacy is discussed as a social issue. Powerful images can be built up with this metaphor, as in a recent newspaper headline: ‘12-year-olds caught in epidemic of illiteracy’. Further links are suggested by a cursory glance at other newspaper headlines: across the world illiteracy is often linked with criminality, with not being able to get a job, and with being a drain on the economy.
To move to another metaphor, a view of literacy which is at the root of much educational practice is that of treating it as a skill or set of skills. This has been very powerful in the design of literacy programmes at all levels of education. The acts of reading and writing are broken down into a set of skills and subskills. These skills are ordered into a set of levels starting with pre-reading skills and they are then taught in a particular order, each skill building upon the previous. Literacy is seen as a psychological variable which can be measured and assessed. Skills are treated as things which people own or possess; some are transferable skills, some are not. Learning to read and write becomes a technical problem and the successful reader and writer is a skilled reader and writer. As an educational definition of literacy, this view is very powerful, and it is one which spills over into the rest of society. It is often drawn on in government strategies for literacy.
It is important to realize that this idea of skills is a particular way of thinking about literacy; it is no less a metaphor than the disease metaphor. Everywhere there are metaphors for talking about reading and writing, some very graphic, others less so. Paulo Freire, for example, presented the idea of traditional literacy education as being banking, where knowledge is deposited in a person. It is a thing, almost an object which is given and received; shifting the metaphor slightly, empty people are filled up with literacy. He contrasts this deficit view with a view of literacy as a form of empowerment, as a right, as something which people do, a process rather than a thing.
Everyone has a view of literacy, and opinions on the subject are often held tenaciously. These views are expressed through metaphors. However, different metaphors have different implications for how we view illiteracy, what action might be taken to change it and how we characterize the people involved. For example, if illiteracy is a disease, then the people involved are sick, it should be eradicated, and experts need to be called in to do the job. If it is a psychological problem, then therapy or counselling are needed. Other metaphors call for training, empowerment, special education or social support. The participants might be construed as students, customers, clients or recipients. The blame, if it is blameworthy, might be attributed to fate, the individual, the school, the family, or the social structure. Note that some metaphors are within the education sphere, while others branch out into counselling, therapy and elsewhere. In all of them literacy has been socially constructed. Kenneth Levine discusses this (1985, p. 172) and has a tentative chart of different social ways of talking about illiteracy. Table 2.1 is an updated version of this.
Another approach is to view literacy in terms of access to knowledge and information. To be literate is to have access to the world of books and other written material. When viewed this way, the word literacy itself has become a metaphor which has been applied to other areas. This has happened with terms like cultural literacy, computer literacy, information literacy, visual literacy and political literacy. Here we see literacy loosely as understanding an area of knowledge.
The trouble with metaphors for literacy such as that of a disease or a set of skills is that they are limited in scope and do not capture the breadth of what is involved in reading and writing. I want to explore this, but first it is necessary to say some general words on metaphors and theories, in order to make clear the approach being taken in this book.
Table 2.1 Some ways of talking about literacy
Theories and metaphors
In arguing for a different way of thinking about literacy, it is important to be very conscious and reflective about this activity. We need to be very clear about the language we are using. Throughout, I will be scrutinizing and deconstructing many of the concepts which structure and scaffold the ideas of literacy. This will include notions of reading, writing, skill, illiterate. The discussion will also embrace many ideas and concepts which do not appear at first to be directly related to literacy, such as when we examine what is meant by terms such as learning, evolution, mainstream culture. In addition, in slipping from discipline to discipline it will be obvious that terms are used in different ways. What I am trying to do is to find a way of talking about literacy which can bring together insights from these different areas. What is needed is not exactly a definition of literacy; rather we need a metaphor, a model, a way of talking about literacy. What sort of activity is literacy?
Before addressing this set of questions, it is necessary to say a few words about metaphors in general, how they work and what their role is. The notion of metaphors used here is broader than the everyday use of the term. I will describe what I mean by metaphor, then I will look at some definitions of literacy and describe some of the ways of talking about the subject which are developing in the field of literacy studies. When this has been done I will move on to another metaphor for literacy.
As part of living we all make sense of our lives; we can talk about what we do; we explain and justify our actions, our feelings and our intentions. We construct theories to make sense of the world. Our theories affect our action, just as our emotions and our intentions affect our actions. We adjust and change our theories in the light of experience. This applies to literacy as much as to any other part of life. Everyone has a view of literacy; everyone in some way makes sense of it. Everyone who uses terms like reading has a theory of the nature of literacy underlying their use of the word. I am going to call these views of literacy people’s everyday theories of literacy. They are sometimes called folk theories. I prefer everyday theories, as folk already has the idea in it that they are not really true and is therefore pejorative in some sense.
These points about everyday theories apply equally to the theories of the specialist, the professional, the researcher. These people have theories which they (we?) are often more conscious of. However, these theories, which I will call professional theories, are developed and changed in a similar manner to everyday theories. The main differences between everyday and professional theories are that the latter are often more articulated and explicit; often they aim to be more general; they can be checked in more systematic ways; they are formalized into a seemingly impersonal body of knowledge and they are often passed on in an explicit way by teaching. These bodies of expert knowledge often have higher status and more authority, partly by getting into print. Particular theories can be backed by government policies and then promoted and supported by extensive funding. These official theories become dominant. They can be legally enforced and become the orthodox authoritative way of seeing an issue. Nevertheless, professional theories can be wrong, misleading and harmful and they are not necessarily superior to everyday theories. It is important not to give special privilege to professional theories as being inevitable right, or perfect, or as replacing everyday theories.
I distinguish everyday theories and professional theories but they are similar in kind. In people’s actual lives they overlap. Social science and other theories leak into life, to use another metaphor. They provide the terminology and framework for talking about an area. For example, some of the concepts of Freud’s theories about the mind and the subconscious have passed into everyday language. Another example would be views on child care, where the theories of psychologists and others influence everyday practices, including ways of talking about children. It is important to realize that professional theories can influence everyday discourse but in many areas, as far apart as nuclear energy, medical knowledge and general public understanding of science, there are questions raised about the role of professionals and the status of expert knowledge.
When talking about theories of literacy so far, one of the main professional theories underlying media, politicians’ and parents’ talk is that of literacy as a set of skills. It is a professional theory, embodied in textbooks and teaching materials, taught in institutions, supported by a legal infrastructure and guiding much literacy instruction in schools and colleges. It also leaks into life and forms part of people’s everyday theories of literacy. The idea of skills and levels becomes the way parents talk about their children’s progress; this approach may suggest, for example, that as a set of skills reading is best taught by a teacher, that learning to read should be isolated from other learning, and that the parents have no independent role in a child’s learning to read.
The leak between everyday and professional theories works in both directions. As well as professional theories influencing everyday discussion, there is an influence in the opposite direction. Professional theories are articulated mainly in words from everyday life; words like ‘intelligence’ or ‘evolution’ are given more technical meanings, as researchers try to talk in a more precise manner. Nevertheless, professional theories are incomplete and are expressed partly in ordinary language. Inevitably, everyday usage fills the gaps left in these theories. The teacher of literacy at any level is partly guided by professional theories put over in training courses, but teaching is guided equally by everyday knowledge which fills out and completes the partial professional theories. This is inevitable and is part of the nature of theories; it is not some failure of professional theories. Another result of this mixing of different sorts of theories is that it is not clear whether common academic theories, such as ‘the great divide’ between oral and literate or the superiority of the alphabet over other writing systems, are mainly everyday theories or professional theories. This argument about the role of everyday theories in professional theories is relevant throughout the book and should be borne in mind in several of the discussions.
Another aspect of theories which is important for the discussion on literacy is that they are developed from experience in particular areas; they are then stretched to cover larger areas. The example of literacy as a set of skills will be given later as an illustration of this. Our knowledge is always partial and we need to generalize our experience to make sense of more of life. As a consequence, the backing for our theories is always partial. Mistakenly, we often look for one answer to cover everything, so that theories which are half true get extended too far to cover inappropriate areas.
Theories also differ in what they emphasize. This has its roots in the fact that theories differ in what they set out to do. Take, for example, the idea of individual differences in how quickly children learn to read. If you need to classify children in school and later in college, then grading and sorting become very important. Individual differences in how children learn to read, however small and impermanent, become highly salient. In another theory such differences might be completely irrelevant. Or to give another example related to literacy, issues of access and power are important in critical approaches to literacy, while in other theories they could hardly even be plausible concepts.
Metaphors and thinking
In the approach being taken here I am also making certain assumptions about the mind and thinking: crucially, there is an internal world, there is an external world, and there is some relation between the two. I will be taking a constructivist view of this, where people construct a mental model of the external world, with language at the centre of the construction. As a starting point, our theories are articulated in language, and in everyday language. One way of doing this is with metaphors, through the words we use, the labels we give things and the names we give to activities. This is a normal use of language and, in fact, there is no alternative to it. We use language to imagine what the world is like and what it might be like.
Most of language relies on metaphors, most words and relations between words are metaphors. One reason for this is that we need metaphors for talking about things which are not concrete. A common starting point is the physical world. We use physical distance to talk about time, for instance, as in ‘the week ahead’ or ‘from Monday to Friday’. Crucially, metaphors for the mind are often structured from the physical world too; this relates to literacy with such ideas as that of putting thoughts into writing. The skills metaphor, which posits a set of abilities which we either have or do not have, represents another very physical metaphor. We internalize the physical as metaphors for representing the abstract. I will not pursue this in any detail here. (And it is not essential for you to believe this in order to continue reading. I will just keep to the parts which are necessary for a discussion about literacy.1)
Another shift between different areas is the way we use ‘say’ for ‘read’, ‘see’ for ‘understand’, ‘talk’ for ‘write’. This is interesting in that since listening is aural and reading visual, they get mixed around: ‘I don’t see what this book is saying’, or in this book where I write ‘what I am talking about is …’, or a letter I received which asked me to ‘… say in writing the things we discussed on the phone’. This is common everywhere, including the teacher talking to the young child in the beginning reading classroom, and we are usually oblivious of the fact that we mix these modalities. One researcher even reports the anecdote of the child who thought herself deaf because she could not hear the letters whispering to her – she could not hear what the letters said.
Something further to say about metaphors is that they themselves are part of larger systems; they fit together and form discourses, which are coherent ways of representing the world (Gee, 1996; Fairclough, 1992). Words are situated within the structures of other words. Metaphors are part of whole theories. They are like the tips of icebergs, in that the words we use bring whole theories with them. Using one aspect of the visual metaphor for understanding can imply others. Looking more broadly, concepts like intelligence, evolution, society and the individual are also used within the frameworks of broader discourses, although these might be more difficult to ascertain. These terms are important as organizing ideas. They organize a domain and stretch beyond a domain. Intelligence and evolution are two organizing ideas used in everyday thought. They are theories, they are metaphors of everyday thought. Simultaneously, they do two opposing things for the areas they are applied to – such as when talking about literacy. On the one hand, they enrich our everyday thinking; at the same time they constrain it. These other words inevitably have to become part of the discussion of literacy. Even seemingly innocent everyday terms when discussing literacy such as mainstream, western, or the insidious use of ‘our’ when discussing literacy practices assume that the reader and writer share cultural practices. (I am also guilty of this.) These terms need to be unpacked.
We need these organizing principles to help us make sense of the complex world we live in. A good theory or metaphor illuminates. It takes you further, it provides new insights and makes new connections. Concepts link with other concepts and we need to group them together. This view of metaphor will recur; it is an essential aspect of the constructivist view of language of chapter 5. It has implications for how people make sense of the world, how children develop, and what language is.
Definitions of literacy
Looking for a precise definition of literacy may be an impossible task; the idea that complex concepts are susceptible to dictionary-like definitions is probably a myth. Nevertheless, dictionaries codify some view of usage, and dictionary definitions can be a useful starting point on the way to a broader view of literacy, a theory of literacy. We need a way of talking about literacy which can encompass these definitions. In this section I will explore what can be learnt from dictionaries and the information they provide. It is a useful place to start as long as we do not confuse the meaning of a word with its etymology and we are not searching for some basic real or literal meaning. Although there is obviously a link, dictionary definitions also need to be distinguished from people’s actual usages of words in their everyday speech.
The words reading, writing and literacy have many meanings. Reading can go from the mechanical uttering of the newsreader to the innumerable levels of interpreting any text. In the sense of understanding meanings, reading has always been applied to a wide range of phenomena, including the reading of barometers, tea-leaves and facial expressions. The word has now been extended to include the different interpretations people – readers – might have of a poem, a novel or a film. Reading is deconstructing.
The English word writing has a systematic ambiguity so that a good writer is on some occasions a neat scribe and accurate speller, while on other occasions the term means a creative author, whether the texts are academic essays, novels or advertising copy. Which of these two meanings of writing should be dominant is a constant conflict in education, whether in the primary school or in the adult education class. We will return to these terms in the chapters on children’s learning and on educational metaphors.
Literacy is a fairly recent English word and its meaning is being extended. I am using the term to cover new broader views of reading and writing, and that is how it is being used in several disciplines and in terms like emergent literacy, used in education. As already pointed out, it is extended in another way to mean competent and knowledgeable in specialized areas, with terms like computer literacy, economic literacy and political literacy. People talk of different ‘literacies’, so that different media can be discussed, and film literacy, for example, can then be contrasted with print literacy.
Tracing the historical changes in how dictionaries deal with such words is instructive. With literacy there are actually four words to consider: literate, illiterate, literacy and illiteracy and there can be both nouns, an illiterate, and adjectives, literate behaviour.2 Going back to Samuel Johnson’s first dictionary of English in 1755, only one of the terms we are interested in, illiterate, is to be found. I have examined 20 dictionaries published in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century. Barclay’s Dictionary of 1820 also only has illiterate. Illiteracy is found in Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1839 with the caveat that it is an uncommon word. Literate, but only in the sense of educated or learned, sometimes appears too. There will be examples later of how in contemporary life the term is sometimes used to mean educated and how sometimes it is contrasted with education.
Literacy is not found in a dictionary dated 1913 but appears in dictionaries from 1924 on. There is also a change in the meaning of literate. A new meaning ‘being able to read and write’ is added. This meaning gradually grows in importance, so that in contemporary dictionaries, such as the COBUILD English Language Dictionary or the Concise Oxford, it is the first meaning, with ‘educated’ given as a subsidiary meaning.
The full-length Oxford English Dictionary has literate in the sense of educated right back in 1432, with a second meaning of one in holy orders coming later. I assume from the evidence of the other dictionaries that it was not a very common word. Illiterate dates from 1556 and is the only one of these four terms which Shakespeare uses; illiteracy dates from 1660. It is more than 200 years before literacy appears, in 1883 in a sentence from the New England Journal of Education about Massachusetts being ‘the first State in the Union in literacy’ (although the Random House Dictionary places ‘literacy test’ more than a decade earlier). Its origin is given as being from the word ‘illiteracy’. Literate in the sense of being able to read and write, the opposite of illiterate, does not appear until 1894. Some of the quotes in the dictionary give a flavour of the historical connotations of the term. A quote from 1859 talks of putting ‘the literate and the ignorant’ on one level. A quote from 1628 refers to ‘a weakling or illiterate’. The claim from 1894 could still be debated today, that ‘literates contribute a larger percentage of their class to the criminal ranks than do illiterates’. In addition, illiterates are not cast totally in a negative light: there was a concern in 1865 that as a result of ‘intellectual tests the army will exclude from it the dashing illiterates whose stout hearts and strong thews and sinews made it what it was under the Duke’.
Application of the term literacy to other areas such as economic literacy and computer literacy is much more recent. The Oxford English Dictionary has a quotation from 1943 referring to economic literacy. The idea of literacy in a communications medium is represented by a quote from the BBC Handbook of 1962 which refers to television and ‘our skills in understanding the medium and our own literacy in it’. Other dictionary examples of the terms include musical literacy, sexual illiteracy and a house being described as having an illiterate design.
Linguists talk of unmarked and marked terms, where with pairs of opposites the natural, normal, default and common word is the unmarked, such as ‘honest’, and the other derived word is marked, as in ‘dishonest’. One might expect literacy to be the unmarked term and illiteracy the marked version which is derived from it. But in terms of history and frequency of usage illiteracy, a fairly pejorative term, is the natural or unmarked term and literacy comes from it.3 Illiteracy belongs to a class of words – disability is another example – where the longer word with an additional morpheme is the unmarked. Literacy and illiteracy do not have to be paired together, of course. Literacy is sometimes contrasted with orality, or with another neologism oracy. Nonliterate can be used as a less pejorative sounding alternative to illiterate; or the two can be used with different meanings, illiterate meaning not being able to read within a culture which is literate, while nonliterate covers people in a culture which has never had literacy. Even talk of a literate culture is an extension of the word beyond the idea of literacy being a property of individual people.
Literate is also contrasted with numerate, a word going back only to 1959 in the dictionary, where it was deliberately coined in a British report by the Central Advisory Council for Education, along with numeracy and innumeracy. The authors of the report are quite conscious of coining the words, unlike most new words, which slip into the language unannounced. In the report the words are contrasted with literate, literacy and illiteracy. A different and much older meaning of numerate as counted or numerated goes back at least to 1432, a similar age to literate in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Translation of these terms brings its headaches, puzzles and contradictions. Literacy does not easily translate into French, while there is no easy English equivalent of the French sense of ecriture as ‘writings’, and illetrisme as ‘unlettered’ is not common in English. Jean-Paul Hautecoeur (1990) points out that in the world of adult education illetrisme is used in France, whereas analphabetisme is more common in other Frenchspeaking places such as Quebec. A word like ‘unalphabetized’ exists in other languages including Spanish, Italian, Greek and Danish. Note that it is a partisan word: in its make-up there is the idea that an alphabetic writing system is necessary in order to be literate. In several languages there is a verbal equivalent, like alfabetizar in Spanish, meaning to make literate. In English alphabetize is something you might do to a list or even to a writing system, but not normally to a person. English lacks any such verb for the act of making people literate.
I will give two examples where I have encountered problems with translation. These demonstrate the confusions which can result. Firstly in Angers, France a group of us from different countries planning an adult education conference argued amicably about the contents of the conference, about whether it should be generally on literacy or specifically on problems with writing. We then argued confusedly about the title. The English-speaking side felt the French wanted a general conference on literacy but then inexplicably wanted the title to be restricted to ‘Writing’. After a morning of cross-cultural miscommunication, it was the patient translators who first realized that the problem was one of translating the term literacy.4
A second problem arose in a seminar when a group of us were discussing a paper which compares print literacy and film literacy.5
