Literacy Ideologies and the Future of Gascon (original) (raw)
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Does literacy no longer need an institution to remain sustainable
Does literacy no longer need an institution to remain sustainable? Some reflections on the impact of texting and messaging Maik Gibson, SIL International The future of many, or indeed most, of the world's languages is endangered; this is not a matter of debate. What is genuinely hard to predict is the trajectory of each language-which ones will be passed on to the next generation, and to the one after that. There is agreement on some general factors involved in language maintenance, shift and death: attitudes both internal and external; changes in lifestyle; contact and relationship with other groups; patterns of multilingualism etc. But how these factors play out in individual cases does not leave us with predictive power of what the precise future of each language is. A related question is what the literacy status of a language is – some language varieties are used exclusively for oral communication, while others are used for writing, and for a variety of purposes. Just as there are social factors that influence the transmission of a language from one generation to another, so there are other factors which help the continued use of a language in a written form. The central question of this paper is whether the conditions which sustain literacy have changed with the advent of writing on digital platforms – more specifically, whether digital writing means that social institutions are no longer strictly necessary for the maintenance of community's use of the written form of the language. On this topic of digital writing, Professor Kornai has written what has proved to be the seminal work: his 2013 paper Digital Language Death. In it he demonstrates that most languages have failed to ascend digitally, that is, to become vehicles of written digital expression, whether on a computer or phone. One of the key questions for linguists is whether digital writing presents an opportunity for minority languages to be used in new sociolinguistic domain (Fasold 1984:60), or whether the digital environment is another factor in the decrease of prestige, and shift to another language. It seems clear that texting, messaging and the internet in general are something of both an opportunity and a danger to minority languages, depending on a wide variety of factors. One of Kornai's key observations is that for digital language use to be vital, it must involve " active use in a broad variety of two-way contexts such as social networks, business/commerce, live literature, etc " (2013:3). With this comment he rightly dismisses the presence of dictionaries and the like as sufficient conditions of digital vitality-interaction is the key, rather than the mere existence of the documentation, as important and laudable task as it is. We can build on this observation by recalling Abercrombie's (1963:14) comment that " writing is a device developed for recording prose, not conversation "-digital writing is, on the other hand, often conversational, as it shares with conversation the in-the-moment interactivity that other forms of writing, fixed on paper, do not. As such, we can make the case that messaging has opened the door to genuinely conversational writing. And it seems to be the case that in writing, conversation makes the use of any vernacular more likely-whether an endangered, minoritised, or non-standard, variety of language.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 1996
The New Literacy 97 is to abandon the assumption of a fixed distinction between oral and literate societies and separation between spoken and written language, and to explore the relationship between orality and literacy in cultural context. The cross-disciplinary approach makes for a broad view of the range of considerations of literacy: from microethnographic, to deeply historical, to inclusion of nontextual modes. These six edited books contain a total of 85 articles, only one of which is repeated. Since it is impossible to give attention to all of the articles individually, I will give a brief overview of each book and then discuss some of the foundations, themes, approaches, and applications that are most interesting and important for linguistic anthropologists. The three Open University books (Graddol, Maybin, and Stierer, eds.; Maybin, ed.; and Stierer and Maybin, eds.) are part of a four-volume set for a course at the School of Education at The Open University (U.K.) called "Language and Literacy in Social Context." (The fourth, less relevant to print literacy, is Media Texts: Authors and Readers, edited by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett). All but 6 of the 48 Open University articles have appeared elsewhere. The introductory material for each volume consists mostly of brief abstracts of the papers, and the editors provide no interpretation of the collections. Language and Literacy in Social Practice provides a general view of literacy as part of social practice, treating historical, cross-cultural and political perspectives on literacy as language in use, including ethnographic accounts from schools, homes, and cultural settings. This book could serve as a general reader for a course on literacy because of the inclusion of background and classic readings from Malinowski, Hymes, Halliday, Voloshinov, Heath, and Freire. While most selections are appropriate, others, such as that from Voloshinov, are rendered incomprehensible by decontextualization. Language, Literacy, and Learning in Educational Practice takes a more educational and psychological perspective, with historical readings from Vygotsky and Bruner. Where it addresses current educational trends, policies and projects in Great Britain, it becomes a venue for in-group battles between advocates of various factions. To the extent that authors stay close to the local issues without connecting them to broader phenomena, the usefulness of the work for scholars outside the United Kingdom is correspondingly limited. But as a case study of the application of a particular orientation to literacy in a particular situation, it is illuminating. Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context is oriented toward applying ethnographic approaches to classroom research. Three general papers introduce ethnographic theory, ethics, and methods. The rest of the book consists of papers that demonstrate the application of ethnography to a range of phenomena in a variety of classrooms. The combination of theory and application gives the volume a good balance. For linguistic anthropologists, the three most interesting collections are those edited by Street, by Boyarin, and by John-Steiner, Panofsky, and Smith, because they contain the most recent material, the most explicitly cross-cultural perspectives, and the more sophisticated theory. All three
1998
eyond literacv begins a realm which for manv is still science fiction. The name civi-B ' lization of illiteracy is used to define direction and to point out markers. The richness and diversiry of this realm is indicative of the nature , of our own practical experiences of self-constituticon. One marker along the road from present to future leaves no room for doubt: the digital foundation of the pragmatic framework. Rut this does not mean that the current dynamics of change can be reduced to the victorious march of the digital or of technology, in general. Having challenged the model of a dominant sign system-language and its literate experience-we suggested that a multitude of various sign processes effectively override the need for and justification of literacy in a context of higher efficiency expectations. We could alternatively define the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy as semiotic in the sense that human practical experiences become more and more subject to sign processes. The digital engine is, in final analysis, a semiotic machine, churning out a variety of signs. Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiences extends beyond computers and symbolic processing. The realization that we must go beyond literacv does not come easy and does not follow the logic of the current modus operandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake in literacv and tradition. Their logic is itself so deeply rooted in the experience of written language that it is only natural to extend it to the inference that without literacy the human being loses a fundamental dimension. The sophistry is easy to catch, however. The conclusion implies that the practical experience of language is identical to literacy. As we know, this is not the case. Orality, of more consequence in our day than the majority are aware of, and in more languages that do not have a writing system, supports human existence in a universe of extreme expressive richness and variety. The University of Doubt Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences , assumes that people are the same. It presumes that each human being can and must be literate. Just as the goa1 of industry was to turn out standardized products , education assumes the same task through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificates testify how like the mold the product is. The question of why we should expect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use of language or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes, and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to help individuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality of writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar is done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to means different from literacy. In order to respond to the needs of the pragmatics of high effi-ciencv leading to the civilization of many literacies, education needs first of all to rediscover the individual, and his or her extensive gamut of cognitive characteristics. I use the word rediscover having in mind incipient forms of education and training, which were more on a one-to-one or one-to-few basis. Education also needs to reconsider its expectation of a universal common
Theories of the New Literacy Studies (NLS)
Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL), 2020
There have been different kinds of literacy studies. This article strives to give a detailed understanding of “The New Literacy Studies” and different terms and concepts relating to literacy as a social practice and event across changing time and place. Discussions have been made on the relation between language and literacy, home literacy vs school literacy, globalization of literacy, transnational literacy and the need for literacy in the public sphere. It is difficult to study literacy within strict borders and contexts. Literacy is just not based on reading and writing but is beyond it. Communication, collaboration, and interaction between people through social practices is essential in understanding the way into literacy. This is where the literacy gets divided into Primary and Secondary Discourse. The New Literacy Studies or NLS have formed the ideological model of literacy which removes the great divide between literacy and orality and conceptualizes literacy as a significant social practice that makes definite principal hypotheses and power relations integral in concepts of literacy as a social procedure. New Literacy Studies (NLS) brings in both the discourses together to completely define literacy. In keeping up with contemporary times, it has become important to consider multimodality in literacy as well as the relationship between literacy and digitalization. This article also explores how the New Literacy Studies (NLS) examine far more pragmatic investigation of the diverse ways of implanting global literacies in the local.
Introduction: Renewing literacy studies
2008
Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham Renewing literacy studies Literacy has emerged strongly in recent times as an applied linguistic research focus, exemplifying in many ways the expanding scope of applied linguistics. There is now a network of literacy researchers from many parts of the world who are engaged in the empirical and theoretical study of literacy practices in a wide range of settings and social contexts. The AILA Special Interest Group on Literacy has contributed to the international networking that has brought together these scholars, furthering collaboration through international seminars, colloquia and conferences, that started in Tokyo in 1999, and has continued in Campinas,
Literacy in a culture of delimitation and provisionality
International Journal of Learning and Media 4(3-4), pp. 19-32, 2014
The concept of literacy has traditionally referred to the reading and writing of printed texts but it has later been widened to include powerful new media. Literacy refers to the competency of citizens to deal with public media. This definition depends on a complex interrelationship of actors as readers and writers in a public sphere characterized by mass communication and recognized media. A prerequisite of this definition is a more or less contingent perspective on the terms reader, writer, and mass communication, which leads to an educationally motivated practice of literacy as critique, creativity, participation, self-control of media consumption, and so on. But the emergence of the Internet and its social media, as well as the ubiquity of mobile devices require a rethinking of the definitional elements and their interrelationship. In view of these new conditions we define media—in particular, mobile devices—as cultural resources within flexible contexts. Our focus is on the mobile complex that generates a new dynamic of mass communication. The resultant educational practices we understand as being oriented toward new forms of appropriation and meaning-making in flexible contexts and of utilizing the cultural resources and multimedia practices of everyday life as relevant for the subjectivity and identity of learners and their modes of self-representation.
Interactive Educational Multimedia, 2004
In order to better grasp the complexity of (mediation of) culture the concept of literacy is taken as a starting point. To grasp the concept of literacy is very complex, because the concept has received different meanings through time and space, as well as different accents from various perspectives, disciplines and contexts. One of the ways to give meaning to the concept is by starting from the recent debate around the crisis of literacy. After all, since that crisis-in the eighties of the last century-a proliferation of books and conferences with the word literacy in their captions can be noticed. Literacy received ample publicity as well, and usually in terms of 'the decline of cultural literacy': youngsters were no longer able to write properly, they would not know their classics any longer, let alone possess any historic knowledge or insight. In short, the attention was inspired by disquieting announcements about waning or otherwise reading and writing skills with pupils and adults and a fear for a constantly diminishing reading behaviour and the impact this might have on the written and literary intellectual culture (Soetaert & Top 1996). Through this double concern one can recognize the two extremes in between which the concept of literacy is defined: from 'the basic skill of reading and writing' to 'reading and assimilating of higher culture'.
ERIC (ED502132). Available at: http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED502132.pdf , 2008
This article discusses the development of the concept of literacy in the context of IC technologies and English language teaching stressing the idea that literacy is no longer a stable concept which was always connected with the basic skills of reading and writing. The rapid developments of today have been changing, affecting and modifying this concept in such a way that it is difficult to say what it exactly means. Throughout the article the author traces the political, historical, social and cultural factors that have been influencing the development of this concept, with special focus on ICT's and how the continuous developments occurring to them gave birth to new literacies as a quite new concept that has come to the fore to mean different things to different people. The article proceeds to tackle the question, "who is to be considered literate?" stressing the idea that literate individuals nowadays know many things and master many skills other than the foundational abilities of reading, writing and calculating. It proceeds to compare between the new concept of literacy and the traditional one trying to answer an important question: "why is it essential to assimilate a new concept of literacy?"