Literacies - Revision history

Lombanaphd: /* A Sociocultural Perspective (‘New Literacy Studies’ approach, a new field) */

2013-09-13T07:02:05Z

‎A Sociocultural Perspective (‘New Literacy Studies’ approach, a new field)

Lombanaphd at 22:55, 9 September 2013

2013-09-09T22:55:23Z

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Lombanaphd: /* Literacies? multiliteracies? new literacies? */

2013-09-06T05:24:01Z

‎Literacies? multiliteracies? new literacies?

Lombanaphd: /* Literacies? multiliteracies? new literacies? */

2013-09-06T05:07:36Z

‎Literacies? multiliteracies? new literacies?

Lombanaphd at 05:04, 6 September 2013

2013-09-06T05:04:43Z

Lombanaphd: Created page with "Literacy is a contested term. There are several perspectives and approaches to the study and to the conceptualization of literacy. The term, has become so stretched that there..."

2013-09-05T23:17:46Z

Created page with "Literacy is a contested term. There are several perspectives and approaches to the study and to the conceptualization of literacy. The term, has become so stretched that there..."

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Literacy is a contested term. There are several perspectives and approaches to the study and to the conceptualization of literacy. The term, has become so stretched that there are literacies of everything nowadays. There is a diversity of the literacy experience. The concepts of literacy depend of its context. They are also related to power, control, and participation in culture and society. What it means to be literate in a given society and culture is subject to change? Literacy has an evolving nature, it changes as society, culture, technology, and media change. Literacy is related to teaching, learning, and education in general.

"with the advent of information technology new ways of using language are emerging which make it difficult to continue to argue that the two modes are completely distinct in nature, or in the skills they require for their use. Consider, for example, the use of email, conferencing and other similar kinds of computer-based communication. All involve ‘writing’, yet in their spontaneity and interactivity they often share more characteristics with spoken conversation than with formal letter writing."

However, in its most basic form, we can speak of literacy as ability for reading and writing in a given language.

Different disciplines have approached to the study of literacy and they have focused on different aspects of the field. The most important approaches, historically, have been:

* psychology : focusing on the mind, literacy as individual’s perceptual and cognitive process. This is the oldest research tradition on literacy: it focused on reading and how readers decoded texts. Understood as an individual skill, dependent on a reader’s intellectual and perceptual capacities. It informed approaches to the teaching of reading.

* applied linguistics : analysis of written texts and the teaching of of reading and writing.

* sociolinguistics and anthropology: observing and documenting literacy activities in everyday life with attention to the social and cultural contexts. This approach studies how language is used in social life. It acknowledges the diversity of literacy experience and what it means to ‘be literate’ in any society.

* learning sciences (education) : interest in researching ways in which children and adults learn to read and write

In my research project, I understand literacy from a historical sociocultural perspective. This approach has an emphasis on social and cultura practice and that is why it has points in common with the "practice turn" of social sciences.

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:02, 13 September 2013
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		+	Arguments are provided for the view that literacy and its study should be framed in terms of the sociocultural approach.
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		+	What has become known, variously, as ‘socioliteracy studies’ (Gee 1996); ‘sociocultural literacy’ (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996), and ‘the "new" literacy studies’ (Barton 1994; Gee 1996; Street 1995).


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	Much work in New Literacy Studies is critical of the emphasis on school literacy only – that is, the kinds of literacy that are required in institutions of formal education – and argue that there is a need for greater recognition of everyday literacy practices in which children and adults engage.		Much work in New Literacy Studies is critical of the emphasis on school literacy only – that is, the kinds of literacy that are required in institutions of formal education – and argue that there is a need for greater recognition of everyday literacy practices in which children and adults engage.
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	=== Multimodality ===		=== Multimodality ===

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 Multiliteracies allow us to see the interrelation between different literacies, contexts, social fields, settings. They reveal the complexity of literacy today as well as the pervasiveness of media and technology. They also show how they are not even. In a given context, a specific kind of literacy can become more important, more relevant. It can be the dominant literacy in a societal field. However, not having the other literacies at hand can turn out into a disadvantage. The acquisition and use of literacies is then also related to social positionality and cultural and social capitals. However, even in disadvantage position, youth can also acquire and use certain kind of literacies that allow them to participate, to articulate identities. However, the not even distribution of literacies, and the absence of some of them, especially the ones that are more critical can limit the participation, the mobility, and the reach of the agency. The uneven distribution of literacies, and the weak development of some of them, is revealed in the complexity of the everyday interactions across several societal fields and micro fields.
-The complexity of literacies is also manifested in the complexity of participation. Understanding this complexity reveals how participation is fluid and changes across different fields. As well as how the interrelation between literacies affect participation. There is a correlation between levels of participation, agency, and control, and the even or uneven development of litercies as well as the critical understanding and interrelated use of them.
+The complexity of literacies is also manifested in the complexity of participation. Understanding this complexity reveals how participation is fluid and changes across different fields. As well as how the interrelation between literacies affect participation. There is a correlation between levels of participation, agency, and control, and the even or uneven development of literacies as well as the critical understanding and interrelated use of them.
 The challenge is then, to identify the literacies I  would like to describe and study. They are multiliteracies, yes. But they need to be divided in subgroups that can be studied and described in a simpler and more detailed way. Some of the more relevant are:

← Older revision		Revision as of 05:07, 6 September 2013
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	* Information literacies		* Information literacies
	* Internet literacies		* Internet literacies
		+	* Visual literacies
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		+	Each of these literacies can also be subdivided in very particular sociocultural practices.

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 Literacy is a contested term. There are several perspectives and approaches to the study and to the conceptualization of literacy. The term, has become so stretched that there are literacies of everything nowadays. There is a diversity of the literacy experience. The concepts of literacy depend of its context. They are also related to power, control, and participation in culture and society. What it means to be literate in a given society and culture is subject to change? Literacy has an evolving nature, it changes as society, culture, technology, and media change. Literacy is related to teaching, learning, and education in general.
 However, in its most basic form, we can speak of literacy as ability for reading and writing in a given language.
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-In my research project, I understand literacy from a historical sociocultural perspective. This approach has an emphasis on social and cultura practice and that is why it has points in common with the "practice turn" of social sciences.
+In my research project, I understand literacy from a historical sociocultural perspective. This approach has an emphasis on social and cultural practice and that is why it has points in common with the "practice turn" of social sciences. That is, literacy is a social and cultural practice, something people do with various texts to participate in the meaning making in social communities. The notion of text could be expanded not only to typography but also visual text, audio, audiovisual, electronic, computer, video, videogame, media, internet and many other kinds of languages.