Literacies

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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.