Educating for Language and Literacy Diversity

Mobile Selves

M. Prinsloo, C. Stroud, M. Prinsloo, C. Stroud

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137309860
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

Educators and researchers in variety of locations increasingly encounter linguistically and socio-culturally diverse groups of students in their classrooms and lecture halls. This book examines everyday forms of talk and writing in relation to standardised forms and schooling expectations to suggest ways forward in educational discourse.

Part I
Studying Diversity in Education Settings

1

Classroom Constructions of Language and Literacy Activity

Constant Leung and Brian Street

The need to improve achievement in literacy through school education has been a constant preoccupation in government policies across the globe. These concerns are exemplified by this British government policy statement: ‘We will improve early numeracy and literacy, promoting systematic synthetic phonics and assessing reading at the age of six to make sure that all children are on track’ (Department for Education, 2010: 43).

Similar concerns can readily be seen in various manifestations in (re)developing countries such as South Africa as well as countries such as the United States and others in the Global North. In terms of national policies we have seen that different national/regional administrations have adopted different ‘fixes’ at different times. For instance in the mid-1980s through to the 1990s a genre-based approach was adopted as a system-wide initiative in New South Wales, Australia (Veel, 2006). The UK governments from the early 1990s onwards have adopted a ‘return to basics’ approach which emphasises the traditional concerns of formal correctness and conventional usage at word, sentence and whole text levels, with a particular emphasis on the importance of teaching ‘phonics’ (DfEE, 1998; Department for Education, 2010). Perhaps we should add that ‘language’ and ‘literacy’ have been conceptualised entirely within a monolingual English perspective.

There continue to be critiques of this position by researchers experienced in the field and some of these connect closely with the approach we are taking here, emphasising a broader, more socially oriented perspective on the learning of literacy. For instance, Wyse (2011) argues that the National Literacy Strategy in England did originally provide scope for such wider pedagogy and content but it was government pressures that led to a narrower, less academically rooted, top-down approach. The Strategy seemed to move from description of selective features of literacy to pedagogic prescription which does not have much support in research. Indeed in another paper, Wyse and Goswami (2008) provide one of the strongest intellectual critiques of the National Literacy Strategy approach in general and of its adoption of ‘synthetic phonics’ in particular. Similarly, Myhill and her colleagues (2012), who have worked closely in the policy arena as researchers, critique the emphasis on ‘policing grammar’ that emerged as part of the ‘top-down’ approach: the concept of grammar has not been well theorised, they argue, and the denigration of many pupils’ backgrounds as an explanation for their language ‘deficit’, may have contributed to the sense of alienation that is still felt. Goodwyn (2011: 6) observes that ‘[t]he literacy debate is far from over but we have learned a great deal what the debate should really focus upon and we are very clear that learning or literacy is not a “game”’. It is, then, from the perspective indicated by these critiques that we pursue research which likewise takes a different perspective than that to be found still in the current policy disposition in England. Similarly in the USA, the ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy, a major educational policy in the past decade that has spawned many subsequent initiatives, is strongly based on a perspective on teaching literacy in schools that emphasises setting high standards and establishing measurable goals, most of which are based on traditional literacy-as-skills views associated with static and monolingual norms (see further elaboration in a later section; Bloome et al., 2005).

In this chapter our primary purpose is not to evaluate the pedagogic efficacies of the various language and literacy teaching approaches, although our work does lead us to question the validity of the theoretical claims on which the USA and UK approaches cited above are based. More precisely, we wish to address a fundamental conceptual issue that is relevant to both educators and researchers: how is ‘literacy’ constructed and enacted by teachers and students in the classroom? Answering such a question obviously has considerable implications for both policy and pedagogy.

In order to address this question we will firstly provide a brief summary of the relevant theoretical and methodological issues in the fields of language and literacy studies; we will then introduce some classroom data that exemplify the issues raised in this chapter as they apply to researching and understanding the uses of language and the enactments of literacy activities in the classroom; finally, we will attempt to draw some conclusions both for research and practice. Although we draw on our work in London as a point of departure in this discussion, we believe that some of our observations and arguments will resonate with experiences elsewhere.

As indicated above in our references to national policy in the UK and USA, our account challenges the dominant approach in public education where the learning of language and literacy has often been construed from a monolingual perspective, where an assumption is made that students share a broadly similar language and cultural background, and that they share a common experiential base (taking age into account). This is an increasingly untenable assumption. Linguistic and ethnic diversity has been shown to be the norm in many parts of the world (see OECD, 2010). For instance, according to the 2011 UK census, 30 per cent of London’s inhabitants (over 2 million people) were born outside the UK. In addition to the overseas-born residents, London has a large number of ethnic minority communities; 53.5 per cent of the London secondary school student population is classified as ‘non-white’ (Hamnet, 2011). Over 300 languages are spoken by school students in London (von Ahn et al., 2010), and 43 per cent (approx.) of London’s school students speak English as an additional/second language (Department for Children Schools and Families, 2009). We can no longer assume London schools to be monolingual and monocultural institutions. While the English language is the medium of instruction and wider communication, it is unsafe to assume that teachers and students share a common language and cultural background, and that the diverse backgrounds do not impact on the way/s in which literacy activities are perceived and enacted (see next section for further elaboration). Similar arguments are being made by scholars working in other parts of the UK, such as Snell (2013) on pupil uses of dialectal varieties in classroom interaction in north-east England and indeed of the world, evident also in Creese et al. (2010) whose work on multilingualism addresses diversity within a variety of sociopolitical settings where the processes of language use create, reflect and challenge hierarchies and hegemonies.

There is also a tendency for curriculum discussions on literacy to focus on the ‘language content’ and ‘standards’ of literacy, as in the UK National Literacy Strategy and the USA ‘No Child Left Behind’ (now supplemented by a strategy known as ‘Race To The Top’), while the account presented here challenges this dominant perspective. The teaching of literacy in schools in England in the past ten years or so, for example, has been prescribed in terms of a content that comprises vocabulary, sentence grammar, understanding and producing text in particular ways within English and/or literacy lessons. But literacy activities in school are an integral part of all curriculum areas, and it is important to recognise that literacy activities are mediated by spoken discourse and other forms of communication (see e.g. Lotherington and Ronda, 2012; Freitas and Castanheira, 2007). Reading and writing activities are as much a constituent part of science and history lessons as they are in English and literacy lessons. So ‘content’ has to be understood more broadly as comprising subject content meaning as enacted in classroom activities through language and other semiotic means. We draw, instead, upon a social practice perspective on literacy to address the complexity of such activities, taking account also of the language diversity issues signalled above. The term ‘practice’ is used in a particular sense in this discussion. Street (2000: 22) distinguishes ‘literacy events’ from ‘literacy practices’:

The concept of literacy practices … attempts to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind. And part of that broadening involves attending to the fact that in a literacy event we have brought to it concepts, social models regarding what the nature of this practice is and that make it work and give it meaning. Those models we cannot get at simply by sitting on the wall with a video and watching what is happening: you can photograph literacy events but you cannot photograph literacy practices.

So one can observe a literacy event, but literacy practice can only be inferred from observed events. A further dimension of this approach is the recognition that literacy events and practices are inextricably linked with other modes of communication – visual, kinaesthetic and so on – in ways that are analysed in the research literature as multimodality (Kress, 2010; Kress and Street, 2006; Jewitt, 2006; Kress et al., 2005) – and in our accounts of classroom practice we will also pay attention to the frequent switching between modes, notably oral, written and visual, that form an integral part of contemporary communicative practices of teacher/student interaction. Elsewhere we have argued that

Language (including English) can no longer be regarded as the primary means of communication; digital communication technology has put paid to that. In making use of and studying [the] new and unfolding communication practices, then, we need to conceptualise English differently, in conjunction with other semiotic resources and activities. (Leung and Street, 2014: xxviii)

Furthermore, we observe that language is but one facet of communication:

... it is no longer sufficient to be able to use English (indeed any named language) in the conventional sense of being able to understand and express meaning through words and sentences, when much of what we do in digitally mediated communication involves the use of a mixture of language, visual–audio and other semiotic resources, and technical know-how to navigate and exploit the technological facilities on computers and mobile devices. (Leung and Street, 2014: xxviii)

Given these complexities, there is a good case for asking the question: ‘What is going on when teachers and students engage in talking, reading and writing?’ In order to understand how such literacy is ‘done’ in school in contemporary conditions, one should ask the question: ‘How is literacy construed and enacted by teachers and students across the curriculum?’ As part of this orientation, we are interested in the ways in which language, in this case English, is used for communicative purposes (including reading and writing) in school contexts. For this reason the work of Hymes on the ethnography of speaking and communicative competence is directly relevant. In order to arrive at an empirical description of what takes place when people communicate with one another in any specific situation, Hymes (1972: 281) suggests that we should try to find out about the language (and other semiotic) resources being used, how these resources are being used and evaluated by participants, and more importantly from the point of view of descriptive adequacy for this discussion, we should ask questions such as ‘[w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Studying Diversity in Education Settings
• Part II Teaching and Research with Diverse Students
• Index