Literacy and Education

Policy, Practice and Public Opinion

Uta Papen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317423041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Literacy is a perennial 'hot topic' in Britain and other English-speaking countries. Concerns about falling standards and a 'literacy crisis' are frequently raised. In response, governments initiate new policies and teaching guidelines. This book addresses the current policies, practices and media debates in England, the US, Scotland and Australia. Literacy and Education examines:

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• How literacy is taught to children in primary schools;

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• The place of phonics in current policies and the arguments made for and against it;

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• How teachers deliver phonics lessons and how children engage with the method;

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• The range of literacy practices children engage with throughout the school day and how they contribute to literacy learning;

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• The contributions a social and critical perspective on literacy can make to current debates regarding teaching strategies;

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• A wide range of research conducted in the UK, North America, Australia and other countries.

Bringing together policy, practice and public debate and drawing on the author's extensive research in a primary school, this essential new textbook provides questions and tasks for readers to engage with. Literacy and Education is ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of literacy and education and students on PGCE courses. It will also be of interest to researchers and teachers.

1 Literacy

Reading, writing and what?

The purpose of this first chapter is to lay the theoretical grounds for my discussion of literacy teaching and learning later in this book. The chapter introduces you to three key concepts of literacy: the skills view of literacy; the idea of literacy as social practice; and critical literacy. In later chapters I will draw on these when looking at policy and teaching practice in schools.

The common view of literacy: literacy as skills

Ask somebody on the street what literacy is and they are likely to say that it has to do with knowing how to read and write. Some people may also mention education (Bialostock, 2003) and perhaps schools. Literacy is commonly understood to mean the ability to read and write. It is thought of as an attribute of the individual: something a person can do. Children need to learn to read and write and while much learning of speech takes place informally – children learn to talk by talking – most of us would say that reading and writing are not easily learned by just doing them. These are skills that need to be taught. The reason why your average person on the street may think about schools when asked what literacy means is because a large part of what schools – and in particular primary schools – do, is teach children to become confident readers and writers.

In our contemporary societies, reading and writing abilities are widely regarded as the key means by which we acquire knowledge, learn about the world and become experienced in a variety of other skills. Literacy is seen, therefore, as an essential tool for learning (Barton et al., 2007). In today’s world, much information is transmitted via print or digital text, meaning that anybody wanting to acquire knowledge needs to be able to read. Communication is also frequently achieved in writing, for example when using social media such as Facebook or Twitter. More generally, we can say that much social interaction and social relations in contemporary societies are ‘textually-mediated’ (Smith, 1990). Even situations which rely primarily on oral communication are likely also to involve written texts as a key component – think, for example, about speeches or university lectures. Because we rely so strongly on literacy as a key means of communication, knowledge acquisition and knowledge exchange, to become a full member of our contemporary societies it is important to be able to read and write.

So literacy is commonly understood to mean the ability to read and write: something which is labelled the ‘skills view of literacy’ (Papen, 2005) and this is the dominant discourse of literacy shaping public opinion and policy in Britain (and other countries). I will say more about how I understand the term ‘discourse’ in Chapter 4, but for now it is enough to say that discourses are about specific views and opinions relating to particular aspects of the world, in our case literacy. The skills view is one such discourse about literacy: it is a specific way of understanding what literacy is and how it can be taught. As the skills view is shared by many politicians and educators it enjoys a very influential position. It has a direct impact on what is and is not taught in schools and what kind of approach is used for the teaching of reading and writing in primary school classrooms. This is what makes it a dominant discourse.

According to the skills view, reading and writing are based on a set of abstract competencies that allow readers to link letters to sounds. Once these are acquired, it is assumed that readers can decode and make sense of a variety of text genres and language styles. The skills view also assumes that there are common literacy standards everybody can and ought to achieve. This is debatable.

By and large, the teaching of reading and writing in schools is informed by a skills view of literacy. In English-speaking countries across the world, phonics (Lewis and Ellis, 2006a) – a specific approach to teaching literacy – dominates policy and practice. Phonics, as I will show in Chapter 6 of this book, is firmly grounded in a view of literacy as a set of generic and abstract coding and decoding skills. These days, phonics is much hailed as the most successful method for teaching children to read and write. But phonics is also subject to much criticism, in particular for the way it seems to dissect reading into the use of specific and isolated skills.

A different way of looking at reading and writing: literacy as social practice

Over the past twenty or thirty years, the skills view of literacy has increasingly been challenged by researchers and practitioners who see literacy as made up of more than skills that must be acquired (see, for example, Barton, 2012). These educators and academics see literacy as social and cultural practices whose meanings and purposes vary with the context of use. They acknowledge the diversity of literacy activities – things people do with literacy. These are referred to as ‘literacy practices’, which are engaged in by children and adults.

In their now famous book Local Literacies (Barton and Hamilton, 1998), Barton and Hamilton define literacy in the following way:

Literacy is primarily something people do; it is an activity, located in the space between thought and text. Literacy does not just reside in people’s heads as a set of skills to be learned, and it does not just reside on paper, captured as texts to be analyzed. Like all human activity, literacy is essentially social, and it is located in the interaction between people.

(Barton and Hamilton, 1998: 3)

Here Barton and Hamilton describe reading and writing not just as skills that individuals possess but as activities in which people take part. To capture this idea of people ‘doing’ things with literacy, they and many others talk about ‘literacy as social practice’ or ‘literacy practices’.

When trying to explain what literacy practices or literacy as social practice means I usually start by asking my audience to consider the kind of situations on an ordinary day when they grab a pen or open their laptops, mobile phones or tablets. Considering everyday uses of literacy such as writing shopping lists, reading recipes or cookery blogs, downloading music, sending text messages or reading an appointment letter for a dental check-up, we can quickly see that while all these activities involve literacy, in each case literacy is part of a wider activity or practice – for example, cooking. Furthermore, what form of literacy is involved in these different activities is not always the same. But what is different about these various literacy practices (and I will be more specific about what this means further below)? Do they not all simply rely on the users’ ability to read and/or write? They certainly do, so in that sense you might want to say that the skills view (see above) is spot on: literacy requires the ability to code and decode letters and words.

There is more to literacy than this kind of ‘generalized competence’, however (Baynham and Prinsloo, 2009: 3). More is required than simply being able to code and decode letters. This ‘more’ is firstly drawing on knowledge and understanding the reader/writer has of the situation and the kind of text s/he is engaging with. This includes, for example, knowing what kind of language is needed when completing an application form to open a bank account compared to how we can write and what we can say in a letter or email to a friend. We can see here that literacy involves understanding of different genres – knowledge about how language is used in specific contexts and for specific purposes. We can think of this as competence, but this is ‘situated, communicative competence’ (Baynham and Prinsloo, 2009: 3). Competence here means knowing what the text is about and how it is presented as well as knowing what to do with it. This is known as ‘cultural knowledge’ and much of this has been acquired through a process of socialization, taking part in literacy-related activities, watching and copying others and also being told and shown how to do it.

Here is an example to illustrate what I mean by cultural competence. Think about Christmas cards. British readers are likely to be familiar with the practice of giving Christmas cards to friends and acquaintances, colleagues and neighbours. Such cards usually have a picture at the front and a pre-printed message such as ‘Season’s Greetings’ inside to which the sender may add a personalized greeting. Non-British readers may wonder what these Christmas cards are about. I certainly did when in my first winter in England, as Christmas approached, the cards began to arrive in our mail box at home and my pigeonhole at work. Many people gave us Christmas cards, including neighbours who we hadn’t met or colleagues with whom I worked only rarely. I wondered about the purpose of these cards. Looking more closely at the content of the cards, there seemed to be conventions about what to write (and not to write) on such a card, how much or how little text to include and who to give a card to. But I was not familiar with these conventions, as this is not a literacy practice common in my home country. The choice of the picture on the front and the text inside the card seems to offer a statement about the sender’s identity – for example, whether the image was religious or rather referring to – connoting – Christmas as the season of more material pleasures. Finally, I could also see that there were common practices having to do with how or whether the sender combined the pre-printed message on the card with an individualized greeting.

I have chosen this example because the writing of Christmas cards is a culturally specific literacy practice. When I first received these cards, I was not sure how to react, who to give a card in return and what to write on them. Clearly, I lacked the situated and cultural competence (see above) required for full and effortless participation in this literacy practice. As I had not acquired such cultural competence through socialization I had to learn it in more explicit ways by, for example, asking some of my new friends to share with me the hidden rules of this – to me very British – practice.

Literacy, as is illustrated by the above examples, is not one, but many. Literacy differs depending on who uses it, the context within which it is used and the purpose(s) it serves. Therefore, instead of speaking of literacy in the abstract and singular, it is more helpful to think about it in terms of specific literacy practices, specific things we do with literacy, as in the literacy practices of writing Christmas cards or playing computer games. Here are some more examples to further illustrate these points about literacy practices as multiple and specific. Think about the differences between reading a novel, reading a manual to build a bookcase and reading a website to book a plane or rail ticket. These three reading activities have different purposes, they are carried out in different contexts and they involve dealing with different forms of language. They also, to a greater or lesser extent, require the use of modes other than written language – for example, diagrams or other visuals – a point I will return to in later chapters.

School literacy practices

The idea of literacy as different practices is not limited to everyday contexts of reading and writing. It is a very useful concept to describe and explain what is going on in schools and other educational institutions. Schools are social contexts every bit as much as workplaces or family homes. In school and workplaces specific literacy practices are required and valued. ‘School literacy practices’ (Street and Street, 1991) are the forms of reading and writing that children are expected to learn and use in schools. Think, for example, about essay writing. No doubt this is a specific literacy practice, shaped by the rules and conventions of what counts as good essay writing in the eyes of the teacher, the school, the university and the members of the exam board. Now compare writing an essay with writing a text message. No doubt the purposes, expectations, uses of language and contexts are very different. Both these practices follow norms and conventions and these may have to be learned. This is clearly the case with regard to essays whereas you may think that writing text messages is simply something you do that does not require formal acquisition. That may be the case, but have you ever watched somebody who has just been given their first mobile phone compose their first text message? Using the predictive text function is something one needs to first gain some experience with. But text messages also rely on the writer knowing the situation specific forms of language that would be seen as appropriate and would be understood by the recipient. This may include the use of specific words, abbreviations or emoticons. The conventions of using such symbols may not be explicit, but they develop and become established amongst people who write to each other regularly.

The contrasting examples of essays and mobile text messages illustrates that as part of being literate, children and adults also need to know when it is or is not appropriate to use a specific form of language or text. Texting language is not appropriate for use in an essay or as part of one’s homework. Here, the requirement is for standard spelling and grammar.

Essays are just one example of school literacy practices. There are many more such practices, including, for example, comprehension exercises, reading schemes, class registers and tutor feedback. I will discuss further examples of school literacy practices in Chapters 6 to 8.

Literacy as a situated practice

All the examples I described so far, school or non-school, illustrate a key point about literacy practices: Literacy not only comes in different forms and serves different functions, but is also valued differently according to the situation and context of which it forms a part. This is what Barton et al. mean when they talk about literacy being ‘situated’ (Barton et al., 2000): it is always part of a wider activity and context, as part of which the specific forms of reading and writing used have meaning and are given value and status.

If a group of six- and seven-year-old children, as part of playing shop, writes labels on objects for sale in their shop and draw and cut out pound notes, literacy here is first and foremost embedded in (situated in) play and the purposes of play. Aspects of the context to pay attention to here include the setting itself (the place where they play), children’s relations to each other, their social and economic background, the forms of play they are familiar with and regularly engage in, their feelings towards this play and the writing it includes, etc. In this context, writing has value for the children primarily in the sense that it serves their wider goals of play. How they write their labels – if their spelling is correct or their handwriting is neat – is unlikely to matter to the children, as long as the labels communicate what they intended them to say.

If, however, one of these children, later in the day, sits down to practice their list of spellings for the week with their mother, this is a very different literacy practice and different rules apply. Weekly spelling exercises are a common practice in many British schools. Children may be invited to learn ten words per week, as part of their homework. In class, they are tested on these words, receive a certificate and a new list of words if they pass or are asked to try again the following week if they make more than two mistakes. Such spelling exercises are embedded in a specific purpose, different from the role literacy played in the shopping game. In this case, the goal is educational and what the child does is clearly framed by this wider aim. The child has to learn standard spellings and will be tested on their knowledge of these established conventions for how we spell words. Clearly, in this context, a specific form of literacy is valued and the child has to demonstrate their ability to use this form of writing.

The point about literacy being situated and different literacy practices being more or less highly valued depending on the context offers a perspective for researchers, teachers, parents and others for looking at literacy that is different from the skills view. What I want to suggest here is that looking at literacy as situated social practice – looking at what people do that involves literacy – offers a way of learning about literacy that is different and complementary to what we learn about literacy by measuring people’s skills through abstract and generic tests. It also offers a complementary perspective to more cognitive and experimental studies conducted in the field of educational psychology. The concept of literacy as social practice can be drawn on to examine critically how reading and writing are taught and learned. It does so by looking in detail at specific situations in which literacy is engaged with, in educational contexts as well as in children’s homes. This new perspective, researchers and practitioners have shown, can be usefully drawn on when examining teaching situations (Barton et al., 2007; Ivanič, 2010). Looking at literacy practices draws our attention to aspects of literacy that the skills view cannot capture. This includes the social contexts and social relations as part of which literacy is used, including the social relations that shape teaching and learning in schools and that determine what forms of literacy are accepted as ‘correct’ and of value to a child’s learning. Other aspects include children’s feelings toward...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Literacy and Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Literacy: Reading, Writing and What?
• PART I: Literacy Policies and Their Reception by the Media
• PART II: Literacy in Schools: Beyond Phonics
• Index