LITERACY

Introduction
The foundation of schooling and the mark of an educated person, a facility with written language has also been variously promoted as a human right, a precursor to economic development, and a path to critical consciousness. Scribner (1988) helpfully captured such multiple meanings and purposes by examining literacy from the vantage point of three metaphors, each of which suggests particular affordances, constraints, and contradictions : literacy as “adaptation,” literacy as “liberation,” and literacy as a “state of grace.” As implied by these terms, some understandings of literacy have privileged its practical function as a necessary everyday tool; others have looked to its emancipatory potential, linking it to heightened political awareness and collective movements; others still have focused on literacy’s promise to elevate the individual through the access it promises to literature and knowledge and the entry point it provides to religions of the book.
Perhaps the single most important conceptual advance in the study of literacy over the last 30 years has been just this: an appreciation of its definitional impermanence, its fluidity,
and its multiplicity. Indeed, it has become commonplace within certain bodies of scholarship to speak of “literacies,” and further to argue that literacy should be considered a social practice, as embedded within culture and as depending for its meaning and practice upon social institutions and conditions, including the technological tools at hand. What will become apparent this chapter, however, is that such understandings of literacy have often conflicted not only with competing academic strains, but with the customary ways in which literacy is defined and regulated within schools and other institutions.
By focusing on this particular theoretical orientation, the writers omit numerous studies that have examined literacy from other disciplinary points of view, including important work in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology on reading comprehension, reading and writing processes, language development in writing, and spelling. For such perspectives, we refer readers to Williams’ (2004) recent review, which divides literacy studies into “narrow” and “broad” camps and then concerns itself primarily with the former, highlighting research that privileges individual capacities and offers reading and writing as separate domains. By contrast, we review the scholarship that Williams characterizes as taking a “broad” interpretation of literacy. It focuses on literacy use in a range of contexts, including but not limited to school; it takes as its unit of analysis, not an individual psycholinguistic act, but the broader historical, cultural, and social contexts that lend literacy its meanings within purposeful human activities; it connects the production and reception of written texts with oral language and increasingly with other modes of signification, such as images; and it remains alert to the insight that literacy, though commonly offered unselfconsciously as a neutral tool, does not operate in a decontextualized manner outside fields of power, and can itself be implicated in the maintenance of social and political inequalities as well as turned toward the egalitarian.
The above description is dauntingly broad and interdisciplinary, but both the genius and the Achilles heel of the emergent field called the New Literacy Studies (Street, 1993; Gee, 1996) is its determination to capture the multiplex human activity of meaning making through textual artifacts and other modalities in all of its complexity and constraints and potential. This hybrid field is thereby an exciting enterprise, welcoming all comers and making room for new research conceptualizations. With technical advances in digital communication and digital media; with new theoretical insights from related fields such as semiotics, cultural geography, and social and cultural studies; and let it be said clearly, with our ever increasing global economic disparities and senses of religious, cultural, and ethnic difference and division,now more than ever there is the need to understand the nature and purposes of texts and their related compositional tools, and to advocate, foster, and design their more equitable distribution and their more just and critical use.


A brief history

For decades, the assumption being that the spoken word is primary and writing just a means of representing speech, reading dominated academic studies of literacy for much of the twentieth century and was in fact more often than not solely equated with literacy among academics and the wider public.
The beginning of literacy studies proper is often linked with Goody and Watt’s (1968) provocative essay, “The Consequences of Literacy,” which argued for literacy’s pivotal role in cognitive, social, and economic development. Goody and Watt singled out literacy as a primary explanation for Greek and thereby Western achievements. This essay, and related bodies of work that adopted a similar strong and causal view (Ong, 1982; McLuhan, [1964] 1995), collectively came to be known as “Great Divide” theories. These were quickly challenged by a range of scholars who reined in such claims by providing their own persuasive counterexamples from other cultures and times. Goody himself soon offered qualifications to his and Watt’s claims. Literacy has implications, it came to be said, rather than consequences. Yet the view of literacy as a dividing line, as signaling in ways that mere speech has not, important differences in habits of mind and human and societal capacity, is a powerful trope, one that continues to wield influence in policy, practice, and scholarship the world over.
One monumental study that was led by psychologists, and that ultimately took the conceptualization of literacy in fundamentally new directions, was Scribner and Cole’s (1981) work with the Vai of North Africa, a people who have the distinction of inventing an original writing system for the Vai language as well as employing the scripts for English and Arabic. They were especially interested in testing empirically the theorizing of the influential Soviet thinker, Vygotsky (1978), who had assigned special import to writing as a psychological tool that structures mental activity. What they discovered, combining ethnographic field work with surveys and experiments to determine the cognitive benefits that accrued from literacy in the three languages, was that literacy does indeed have consequences for mental life. However, those effects are particular to specialized literacy practices, so the impacts of literacy can be more or less powerful, depending on the varied social and cultural contexts that afford and constrain them.
Bringing together perspectives from linguistics and anthropology, Hymes (1964) urged the study of language in context and the inclusion of language in the study of cultures. He proposed that an “ethnography of communication” would usefully reveal the communicative patterns of a community and contrastively the range of patterns across communities. And so it did, perhaps most brilliantly for literacy studies, via Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) long-term ethnography of three contiguous US communities over a decade in the 1960s and 70s. Her juxtaposition of the “ways with words” that characterized a black working-class, a white working-class, and a racially mixed middle-class community revealed the interdependence of language use with habits and values and ways of participating in local social worlds. Far from being a neutral skill with governable cognitive or social consequence, or even a monolithic concept, literacy was variably conceptualized and experienced. that literacy is invariably an empowering tool, researchers and theorists have attempted both to characterize empowering versions of literacy and to delineate the ways in which literacy can be implicated in relations of power. This strand of work is indebted first to Freire ( [1970] 1997) and his contribution to an understanding of literacy as a coming to consciousness regarding sociopolitical circumstances and positionings, including the conception of self as an agent capable of remaking one’s relation to history.
The New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Street, 1993; Gee, 1996) built on the ethnography of communication tradition, continuing to document literacy practices in local communities, but it began to provide more explicitly an analysis of the interplay between the meanings of local events and the role of literacy within them, and a sensitivity to the structural dimensions of institutions and economic and political relationships.

Core Themes
Historicizing literacy

Early work focused on charting the landscape of readers and nonreaders through an examination of wills, marriage records, and other documents, while later work looked into how literacy was distributed across socioeconomic classes and what advantages accrued from being literate.


Technologizing the word
Another recurrent theme in literacy studies treats the material tools associated with literacy: books, writing implements, and of course now digital technologies. In point of fact, scripts such as the alphabet can in themselves be viewed as technologies, as Ong (1982) noted when he coined the phrase “the technologizing of the word.
Much of the work around technologies and literacy currently focuses on the promise of digital tools for communication and for representation, including an interest in how the internet and multiple audiences and spaces for authorship aid the construction of new identities. Lam (2000), for example, provided a telling case study of a Chinese American adolescent who found a productive context for learning English and building an identity, not in the English as a Second Language classroom, but in electronic chat rooms and email communication. An important branch of this scholarship is interested in characterizing what counts as literacy in a digital multimodal world.

Literacies across languages and cultures

With Street’s call for the documentation of social practices across cultures came and still continue to arrive a wealth of studies depicting the variation and nuance of reading, writing, and speaking practices in a range of crosscultural and cross-national contexts (Street, 1993). A hallmark of these studies is “close descriptions of the actual uses and conceptions of literacy in specific cultural contexts” (Street, 1993: 2).
With globalization and the cross-national spread of popular cultural forms among youth, such as rap and hip-hop (Pennycook, 2003; Mahiri, 2004), it becomes ever more important to understand how people make meaning by drawing on multiple language and literacy resources. Hornberger first offered a helpful and much-cited framework for understanding the dimensions of biliteracy (1989), but most research on biliteracy and multilingual literacies is more recent. As Martin-Jones and Jones (2000) note in their edited volume that assembles research on multilingual literacies, to study multilingual language and literacy practices has meant more often than not to be engaged with people from linguistic minority groups.

Literacy and development

The study of literacy has long coincided with studies of development broadly conceived – both as an individual’s participation in changing literacy practices across the life span, and more traditionally, the role of literacy in the growth of communities and societies. From the sociocultural perspective that motivates the work reviewed in this chapter, and drawing on the foundational thinking of Vygotsky (1978) about the social nature of learning and of Bakhtin (1986) about the tensions that thereby thread through it, researchers of children’s literacy learning have also been interested in how children build upon their social worlds – their families and peers as well as society’s ideologies and institutions – for form, content, and motive as they learn to read and write in classrooms (Dyson, 2003). While much thinking about children’s language development and literacy learning has been based on white middle-class norms, increasingly researchers seek to be informed by the study of diverse cultures, ethnicities, and social classes, and to be attentive to gender influences as well. Newkirk (2002), for example, has illustrated how the predilection of particular young North American boys for certain topics, genres, and styles influences their classroom literacy success and participation. Interest in particular age groups also surfaces as part of developmentally attuned research. And thus, the subfield of “adolescent literacy” has gained prominence over the last 10 years, attracting the interest of policy makers and funders in the US (Greenleaf et al., 2001).
Research/Practice

To date, perhaps the most provocative and comprehensive application of theory and research from NLS ( New Literacy Studies ) to conceptions of practice was offered by the New London Group (1996), an interdisciplinary team of scholars meeting in 1994 in New London, New Hampshire; their ambitious aim was to conceptualize a pedagogy for literacy, one fit for current and future times. Their manifesto called for literacy pedagogy to take into account “the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalised societies”; “the multifarious cultures that interrelate and the plurality of texts that circulate”; and “the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (New London Group, 1996: 60). At the center of their argument was the concept of semiotic activity, which they termed “design.” In the view of the New London Group, it is through an informed, intentional process of design on the part of individuals – making creative use of available preexisting designs and resources that one has to hand – that meanings, selves, and communities are powerfully made and remade.
Perspectives from NLS have positively and durably impacted practice, including work derived directly from the New London framework (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). Stein (2004), for example, writing about her work in South Africa, powerfully captured the range of modalities that were used by students to represent their experiences in addition to reading and writing – song, oral story, even silence – and called for a multimodal pedagogy. Yet, as Stein made clear, it will do little good to value multiple literacies and multiple modalities in classrooms, unless assessment and evaluation methods also take new definitions of literacy and learning into account. And here is the rub. We currently know more about literacy learning than has ever been the case before, as research within the NLS framework has offered theoretically sound, pedagogically powerful, and politically alert principles for conceptualizing and teaching literacy as a situated social practice. It is indeed an irony, then, that literacy continues to be viewed and experienced by many as a problem, much worried over by schools, governments, and assorted others.Take from Glinda A. Hull and Gregorio Hernandez