Literacy and Motivation

Reading Engagement in individuals and Groups

Ludo Verhoeven, Catherine E. Snow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135670757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The central question in this volume is how to create a society of "engaged readers" in today's world, where reading is increasingly overruled by other media, such as television and personal computers. Engaged readers, as the term is used in this book, means readers who are socially interactive, strategic, and motivated. This state-of-the-art review contains research on integrating cognitive, social, and motivational aspects of reading and reading instruction, the chapter authors argue that coming to grips with the notion of engagement in literacy requires redefining literacy itself to acknowledge the degree to which it is not only a cognitive accomplishment, but a social activity and an affective commitment as well. Promoting literacy acquisition thus requires interventions that address attitudes and beliefs as much as those that assure cognitive changes in learners. Equally important, the authors posit that literacy engagement involves the integration of cognitive strategies and motivational goals during literate activities. This necessary link between literacy and motivation is addressed from a variety of perspectives. Acknowledging the value of cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons, the book features chapters on the promotion of literacy in different regions around the world.

PART I
THE SOCIAL AND AFFECTIVE CONTEXT OF LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1
Literacy in Everyday Contexts

David Barton
University of Lancaster

The study of literacy in everyday contexts can be seen as a starting point for any endeavor aimed at reading promotion. I want to make three basic claims as a result of examining people’s everyday reading and writing. The first of these is that the meanings and uses of literacy in the home and community are many and varied. This means that a starting point for education can be to reflect on everyday literacy practices, understanding how they are often distinctive to a particular time and place. Educators, researchers, students and parents can increase their understanding of literacy by researching their own practices. Second, studies of everyday reading and writing emphasize that reading is increasingly one of a variety of ways in which people make sense of the world; also, people treat different media in an integrated way, not necessarily distinguishing reading print from other forms of sense making. The teaching of reading needs to be in the context of a range of media. Third, it can be seen that most learning about literacy takes place outside schools; it starts in the home before children go to school, it continues alongside schooling, and it carries on in the home and community right through adulthood into old age. School learning needs to be located within the broader context of learning in the home and the community, and homes can be seen as important sites for learning, both for adults and for children.

To back up these claims, I draw on a detailed study of reading and writing carried out in Lancaster, a town in northwest England. In this chapter I summarize the findings of this study of local literacies and demonstrate the complex ways in which adults are engaged readers in their daily lives. I argue that viewing reading as a cultural practice helps understand the engagement of adult readers in the textually mediated world of everyday life. The focus is on adults, but, crucially, the home is where children first experience reading and writing and it is where they lay the foundations of their learning of literacy. This chapter draws heavily on Barton and Hamilton (1998), where the study is described in more detail.

The Lancaster study involved a wide range of research methods. The central form of data collection was a detailed study of life in one neighborhood. This included repeated in-depth interviews with people in their own homes, some covering a period of more than a year. The interviews were complemented by observations of events such as shopping, cooking, participating in local community groups, visiting the library, and visiting the doctors. There was extensive photography of the visual literacy environment and the collection of documents such as letters, newspapers, leaflets, and notices. Most interviews were recorded and transcribed, and the study resulted in a large amount of data. It is very difficult to bring together and to summarize such a diverse study. I do this by drawing on the concept of vernacular literacy practices, as way of understanding the reading and writing that people do in their everyday lives. This concept provides a useful summary term for much of the reading and writing that our study uncovered.

This research can act as particular case demonstrating the three claims made earlier: that the meanings and uses of literacy in everyday life are many and varied; that reading is integrated with other forms of meaning making; and that much learning takes place outside of schools. It shows the ways in which adults are engaged readers in their everyday lives and how adults’ practices provide an important context for children’s first exposure to literacy practices. The study also provides an example of what can be gained in understanding the engagement of readers from examining reading as a cultural practice and which we have referred to elsewhere as a situated literacy (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000). It can then provide a framework for examining other contexts and seeing the sorts of comparisons and generalizations that can be made in different contexts and across different cultures.

THE RANGE OF LITERACIES IN EVERYDAY CONTEXTS

The first point to make from our study is that there was a great deal of reading and writing in people’s everyday lives. In all areas of people’s home and community lives there was reading and writing. We were also struck by the variety of reading and writing, the many different ways in which people par-ticipated in literate activity. As a way of summarizing people’s reading and writing, we found it useful to concentrate on six areas of everyday life. These are areas of life in which people are active, and we identify the ways in which they bring reading and writing into their everyday or vernacular activities. It is these vernacular literacy practices that we are focusing on; they are essentially ones that are not regulated by the formal rules and procedures of dominant social institutions and that have their origins in everyday life. Rather than go into the definition more fully at this point, I first describe these six areas of vernacular activity and provide examples of the range of literacy practices in them. I then go on to discuss more fully what is meant by the term and to examine the fusion of dominant and vernacular practices.

The first three areas of everyday practice where there was considerable reading and writing are ones that in a general sense are unsurprising; the point of the study was to develop them with examples and with greater detail. These areas are organizing life, personal communication, and private leisure. To these three areas of everyday practice we add three further ones: documenting life, sense making, and social participation. These are areas whose significance we came to realize during the study, in the process of collecting and analyzing the data. In this chapter I go through these six areas one at a time, linking examples from people’s individual lives to broader social practices.

Organizing Life

Much day-to-day activity involves literacy. People structure their lives, and they use literacy to do this. They have notice boards for details of appointments and social activities; they also use calendars and appointment diaries, address books, and lists of phone numbers. Within the home there is regular organization: There are places where letters, pens, and scrap paper are kept; different sorts of books are kept in different rooms, and the order of books on the shelves may be important, reflecting particular classification systems. Many people keep complex records of weekly finances. Transient hand-written notes are also important for organizing life, whether they are common ones such as shopping lists and lists of things to do, or whether they are more individual examples such as lists of people to pray for. There are often records kept of cards and letters that are sent and received, and lists of Christmas cards sent. Many of these activities are the literacy chores of everyday life, and they are gendered just as the carrying out of other household chores is gendered. Some organization is done by individuals for themselves, whereas other aspects are for the family, the household, or other group.

Personal Communication

People send cards and letters to relatives and friends. All sorts of letters are sent and received, and letters come in various forms. We came across examples of letters for family news, to start or end relationships, to invite, to thank, to celebrate, and to congratulate. They included fan mail to pop stars, and enquiries to unknown people. They could be friendly or threatening, signed or anonymous, serious or jocular; some were collaboratively written and read, and some were recorded on video or audio tape. They were especially important for people at times when they were isolated from family and friends; they were also used to maintain relationships that were kept secret from others. Personal letter writing seems to be a particularly accessible from of writing for people and can be seen as a basic genre from which other genres develop, as explored in Barton and Hall (2000).

There are many sorts of personal communication. People also sent and received a range of cards for birthdays, Christmas, and anniversaries, as well as ones for occasions when someone was ill, an exam was passed, or a baby was born. Some were commercial, and some were individually made at home; often they were mixed, with hand-written words added to the printed message. In addition, personal communication is not just letters and cards. People leave notes of all sorts for each other—for example, on the stairs just inside the front doors of their houses, so that they are seen when someone comes home; in the kitchen concerning shopping or meals; stuck on other people’s doors; or slipped through the letter slot. These may be functional; they may be expressing relationships of affection or anger. Some messages are privately circulated; others are designed to be declared and displayed publicly within the home, such as birthday cards on the mantelpiece or wall. As a more public display, in Lancaster people put up signs announcing birthdays, babies, and engagements on the traffic roundabout; this is another form of personal communication. People also pay to put details of births, birthdays, and marriages in the local newspaper. These are sometimes humorous, as when a 50th birthday announcement is accompanied by a photograph of the person at age 5 years. Personal communication takes many forms and serves many purposes, and the literacies used are equally varied and wide ranging.

Private Leisure

Not unexpectedly, we found that people read books and papers for leisure, as ways of relaxing and passing the time. There are patterns in people’s reading: Some people read books and magazines every evening, and some only do this when traveling or when on vacation. Children and adults can be “lost in a book.” Equally, they can be lost in a map, in a magazine, in the local paper, or in the mail-order catalogue. Some of this involves fantasy consumption. People sometimes do this when they are alone, and sometimes in order to be alone; in this case, reading creates a way of being private in a public space. People often read particular sorts of books and avoid others. One man, an avid reader of wartime stories, was vehement in his hostility to fiction and only wanted to read things based on “real life.” In discussions of the promotion of reading, book reading is often taken as the only form of reading, and fiction is taken as the only form of book reading. Our study highlighted how book reading is located in other activities and how fiction is only one form of book reading.

Most of the private leisure we came across was reading, but several people also wrote as a leisure activity, for themselves or for others. In particular, we were surprised at the number of people who reported writing poetry as a leisure activity; it seemed a particularly accessible form of personal writing for them. This, like other examples, fits several of these categories, as sometimes poetry was written for other people, as in the personal communication of a card with a hand-written poem sent to someone in hospital. Other people did different forms of creative writing as leisure activities. Many leisure pursuits are mediated by literacy. Some leisure activities, such as being a fan, involved a range of literacy activities, spanning reading books and magazines and writing notes and letters, and incorporating other media, including television. People varied in the extent to which they used literacy for private leisure; nevertheless, many seemingly straightforward leisure interests, such as hobbies or sport, drew on a complex range of literacies.

These three forms of vernacular practices were starting points; they were in a sense expected and predicted at the beginning of our study and are commonly reported uses of reading and writing. As the study developed, with repeated interviews and further observation we uncovered more activities where reading and writing were important. These three further activities were less expected and were derived from the data. Nevertheless, once identified, they may seem familiar to people across a range of contexts.

Documenting Life

We found that people maintain records of their lives in many ways, through keeping documents such as birth certificates and school reports, and from cutting out reports of their lives such as weddings and sporting achievements from the local newspaper, sometimes organizing them in scrapbooks. They also keep souvenirs from holidays, festivals, and other family events. Some people take photos as records of their lives, and have albums. Many people make and keep recipe books; individually, we found that people keep records of a wide variety of activities, including records about car maintenance, gardening diaries, and notes about health and development, as well as records of finances. People write diaries at various points in their lives, and then keep the diaries; they keep some letters for years, but not others; people keep old address books. There are points when these documents are reread and sorted through. Some of these documents are passed on across generations.

For a few people this activity develops into writing a full-fledged autobiography. Certain people write their life histories; others intend to. This can be an example of the changing practices throughout a person’s life. We had an example of a man in his seventies, who had done no personal writing in his life, deciding to write his life history. This documenting aspect of vernacular literacy may be for oneself, for one’s family, or for a broader community. We came across people keeping records of their broader families and communities and investigating their family and local history, topics popular enough to have their own national magazines in the neighborhood newspaper shop. Local history courses are among the most popular of adult education courses.

SENSE MAKING

People consciously carry out their own research. In the simplest sense, this involves reading instruction booklets and guarantees to see how household items are used or to get them repaired. It includes devotional reading of religious and other inspirational books for personal development and understanding. Beyond this, there were deliberate investigations of unknown topics, such as where people investigated further a family illness, their child’s difficulties at school, or a legal grievance. Again, these could be personal interests, family concerns, or issues covering the whole neighborhood. People pursued these topics by carrying out research: reading, writing, talking to people, and piecing together information from a range of sources. We found that people become local experts on particular topics and others turn to them for help and advice. There can be a tenacious imperative to learn, to find out more, and to solve a problem by trespassing into areas of expertise and tackling literacies normally reserved for others. For example, people may read complex medical or legal books written for professionals in these areas. People have to learn how to do this, and, as adults, they learn how to learn and to find out where and how to get the resources they need. To do this, they draw on and create vernacular knowledge. Less pressingly, as mentioned earlier, people may have interests and hobbies that they pursue and where they become known as experts; this can be on topics as diverse as bird watching, making clothes, car repairs, and travel. This can lead to great differences in what individuals know about. It is revealing to look across a community and to investigate the vernacular funds of knowledge that exist and to understand the ways in which people utilize this knowledge.

Social Participation

People participate in a wide range of social activities. We were surprised at the large number of groups and clubs that exist in the town, and at the fact that everyone in our study seems to have connections to at least one such organization and several people are or have been officers of organizations. There are clubs and associations concerned with animals, nature, sports, religion, music, politics, care for the sick and elderly, and much more. They range from small short-lived campaigning groups to long-established local branches of national organizations. We estimate that there are well over a thousand such groups in Lancaster, a medium-size town. Participation in groups can involve literacy in many ways. People read and contribute to notices and newsletters, participate in meetings, raffles, and jumble sales, and design posters. People write to local newspapers as members of associations and send in reports of activities and achievements. Records of memberships and finance are kept, and there may be complex funding applications. There are different modes of participation; even when people are not actual members of associations, they may still go to meetings, and they may read about the activities of neighbors and friends in the local paper and display notices in their front windows.

As a form of social participation, a minority of people can be described as politically active and, in fact, they describe themselves in these terms; many others, nevertheless, participate in local political activity by signing petitions, attending public meetings, writing letters, and going on marches and demonstrations. In this context, literacy is being used a transformative tool, to effect change. It is noteworthy that at both the demonstrations we have details of, the first anti-poll-tax march and a demonstration against the smell in one part of the town, there were people who said they had never been on demonstrations before. People may participate socially in different ways at particular points in their lives and may move in and out of being active. Sometimes such activity is thrust on people. We documented an example where local land was being sold off to developers and people had to organize themselves quickly into a group, drawing on local knowledge and developing new expertises; many people found that they were engaging in literate worlds of law, campaigning, and local government that they were unfamiliar with.

The six categories just given were identified by starting from individuals’ lives, but they may also serve group functions. It is important not to identify reading and writing as just something that individuals do. Rather, groups of various sorts may use reading and writing in different ways. This is important in understanding ways in which reading can be promoted and supported. In identifying the domain of these literate a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Literacy and Motivation: Bridging Cognitive and Sociocultural Viewpoints
• Part I: The Social and Affective Context of Literacy Development
• Part II: Prevention and Instruction Programs that Promote Literacy Engagement
• Part III: Policy Perspectives on Promoting Literacy Engagement