7. New Literacy Studies

The ‘new’ in New Literacy Studies signals a rejection, in the 1980s, of a cognitivist view of literacy based on the premise of a simple need to decode or encode written language for communication to take place. Rather than conceptualizing literacy as a neutral set of individual skills and competencies, the New Literacy Studies are ‘based on the view that reading and writing only make sense when studied in the context of social . . . practices of which they are but a part’ (Gee 2000). This shift of focus, from literacy as technology to literacy as social practice, has highlighted the ways in which literacy is often implicated in the practices of power, and drawn attention to its uses and effects in people’s everyday lives. It is the concern with the ‘social’ and also with the ‘practice’ of literacy that unites a number of different researchers (Street; Gee; Barton and Hamilton).

The move towards a more socially situated view of literacy is illustrated by Shirley Brice Heath’s concept of literacy events: ‘occasions in which written language is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretative processes and strategies’. Brice Heath’s detailed ethnographic study of literacy events in three socio-economic communities in the southern United States relates the types of text read, the value accorded to them and the ways of making sense of them to different cultural practices at the community level. This, in turn, is related to how children progress with literacy based activities in school. Before children ever reach school most will have been exposed to numerous literacy events and these influence their approach to school literacy practices. If the literacy practices associated with school-based work have not formed a part of the everyday literacy practices of the home, then children may start off at a disadvantage in comparison with the expected norms.

The notion of literacy practices draws on a sociological notion of social practice from Bourdieu, who glosses ‘practice’ as the routine behaviours and patterned sociocultural activities in which people engage. So practices emerge from the relationships between people’s habitually shaped dispositions to behave in particular ways, together with their social, economic and cultural capital, within particular areas of human activity, such as the family and the classroom. The move from social practices to literacy practices is associated with the work of Brian Street (1984) and James Gee (1990). By foregrounding the notion of practices, Street was arguing against the dominant Western view of literacy as a set of skills which are the same in all places and throughout history. Literacy practices are related to specific sociocultural contexts and are associated with power and ideology. He focuses, in particular, on how language expresses, in the multiple contexts in which it is used, who we are, our identities, and what we are doing. Such social languages, both spoken and written, are embedded in our values and beliefs, and often tied to membership of particular social or work-based groups. The view of literacy as a cultural and contextual practice has been the subject of much research within educational settings. Mary Lea and Brian Street (1998) analysed the types of writing that students were expected to produce, the variety of views on what constituted success from academic staff, disciplinary epistemologies and the significance of writing for individual students’ sense of identity. They argue that the complexity of these issues confounds the notion of ‘problem’ students who can’t write – the so-called ‘deficit’ model. Rather, in order to understand the writing practices of academia it is necessary to look at the disciplinary, institutional and ideological preconceptions that underpin academic literacy practices. It is only by making these implicit expectations explicit, by unveiling the institutional practice of mystery, that students can gain the knowledge and power to enter into the powerful discourses of the academy.

Within North America the tradition of teaching rhetoric, composition and professional writing to American college students has created a body of teachers and researchers open to the insights that a more social and ethnographic approach can provide. Their contribution to New Literacy Studies is New Rhetoric or American New Rhetoric which makes use of detailed descriptions of the academic and professional contexts in which texts are situated, and includes data-gathering techniques such as participant observation, interviews, document collection and, to a lesser extent, textual analysis (Bazerman). This social turn in literacy studies has led to the cross-fertilisation of ideas between researchers with a literacy focus and those in other areas of psychological, social and cultural studies. For example, the complexity of composing text, a facet of literacy often overlooked when only the final product is analysed, has become part of the concern of literacy scholars. A text is accomplished through the organisation of language resources, but its meaning relies on its relationship to other previous texts, other similar texts and to the knowledge brought to its reading by a reader. New Literacy Studies do not have such a close affiliation with pedagogy as the genre approaches of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). However, aspects of their methods have become very influential, particularly in combination with English for Academic Purposes genre approaches. Studies now frequently go beyond analysis of text and its rhetorical structure to include interviews, observations and relevant document study (e.g. Hyland, Samraj).

TOPIC 3. Discourse Strategies

I. Information Packaging

1. Given information comes before new

2. Cohesive texts: topic comes before comment

3. Front-focus: initial position for extra focus

2. Discourse Strategies

1. Passives – creating new subjects

2. Different semantic types as subjects

3. “Tough” movement

4. Existentials

III. Focus Strategies

1. Cleft constructions

2. Fronting

3. Left-dislocation

4. Right-dislocation