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New Directions in Literacy Research

Mike BaynhamSchool of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

Mastin PrinslooDepartment of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Introducing the CollectionThe papers collected here are, in the main, based on those presented in a sympo-sium ‘New Directions in Literacy Research’ at the International Association forApplied Linguistics (AILA) Conference held in Tokyo in August 1999. Thesymposium brought together scholars in what can be broadly defined as ‘theNew Literacy Studies’ and aimed to review research developments in the literacyfield across a range of research sites and to identify future directions and agendafor research. Earlier versions of the papers were published on the AILA ScientificCommission on Literacy Website (http://www.education.leeds.ac.uk/AILA).An earlier version of Gemma Moss’s paper was published as part of the AILALiteracy SC Virtual Seminar series on the same website. In order to situate thepapers collected here, it is perhaps useful to start by considering both what theterm ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS) has come to mean over the last decade or soand also the ‘research conversation’ within which it has been developed.

The New Literacy StudiesOriginally introduced in the early 1990s in the work of Gee (1990) and Street

(1993), the term New Literacy Studies is increasingly used to characterise thework of literacy researchers who have taken both a social turn and a discourseanalytic turn (cf Gee, 2000) in their research. Prinsloo and Breier (1996), for exam-ple, situate the theoretical framework of their Social Uses of Literacy (SoUL)Project in relation to NLS, understood as a range of independently developed but(theoretically) supportive work, drawing on a number of disciplines (anthropol-ogy, sociology, sociolinguistics, psychology and discourse analysis). Gee (2000)explores this convergence of theoretical interests, across a range of work in situ-ated cognition, connectionism, sociocultural theory, ethnomethodology andconversational analysis, ethnography of communication, the sociology ofscience and technology, post-structuralist theory, arguing for a broad theoreticalcongruence based on social and discourse analytic perspectives used to investi-gate a range of phenomena, here literacy.

What characterises this range of work is, first, the turn away from a priorispecification of categories of people, such as ‘literates’ and ‘illiterates’ and awayfrom the attachment of ‘typical’ outcomes to membership of such static catego-ries. Second, the turn is to the theorisation of everyday social practice, based onthe premise that literacy practices are always and already embedded in particu-lar social forms of activity. Such literacy practices are fundamentally mutually

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constructed, and are also shaped by both institutionalised and informal relationsof power.

Barton and Hamilton (2000: 1–15) identify the characteristics of an NLSperspective on literacy as follows:

Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these are observablein events which are mediated by written texts.There are different literacies associated with different domains of life.Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationsand some literacies are more dominant, visible and influential than others.Literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goalsand cultural practices.Literacy is historically situated.Literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired throughprocesses of informal learning and sense making as well as formal educa-tion and training.

So, are we talking here about a banner or a movement? We think the best meta-phor for the interconnectedness of work in the NLS is that of network, a networkof inter-related theoretical interests, differently emphasised and inflected in thework of different researchers, but nevertheless permitting the continuation of anongoing theoretical conversation. This theoretical conversation is increasinglytaking place in print, but has its origins in research activity undertaken in the lasttwo decades around the world. (Denny Taylor gives a vivid flavour of this ongo-ing theoretical conversation in her account of a meeting of the Literacy ResearchGroup at Lancaster University in her foreword to Barton et al., 2000). The theoret-ical conversation has been dramatically facilitated over the last decade bychanges in access to electronic media, brought about by the Internet and e-mail.In considering the impact of e-mail and Internet access in developing theresearch conversation, it is important, as Snyder suggests in her paper, not tounderplay inequities of access to these new media. (The contours of the newmedia landscape create technological haves and have nots.)

Research as Process/Research as ProductIt is perhaps unusual in an introduction to a journal issue to emphasise the

process of research and the research conversation in quite the way that we have.The typical unit of the journal is the research article, where the research conversa-tion is formalised into references to and citations of other publications. Yet thework of those in the sociology of science and technology (Myers, 1990; Latour,1987)has alerted us to the importance of understanding the socialconstructionofknowledge, the contingent circumstances within which knowledge is produced,the importance of trailing historically the development of ideas and the microanalysis of their production within communities of practice. As Gee (2000) pointsout, this perspective is highly congruent with that of the NLS. By situating thepapers in this collection within a research conversation, we emphasise thecontingent, social nature of their production, their embedding in preceding andongoing talk, the structuring effects of the social institutions within which theywere elaborated and, of course, their history, both in terms of the life history of

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those participating and in terms of the sociohistorical moment that created theopportunities for their elaboration. Why literacy? Why now?

A discursive politics of knowledge productionCentrally, we would want to situate these papers, and NLS work more gener-

ally, within a discursive politics of knowledge production, asking what counts asknowledge, who is allowed to author it, whose interests does it serve, how andby whom is it contested? Again, work in the sociology of science alerts us to theagonistic character of knowledge production. Different theories vie for space inthe theoretical landscape. The research conversation can rapidly turn into argu-ment and controversy. This indeed is indexed by many of the contributions tothis collection, which demonstrate how contested notions of literacy can be,particularly in relation to policy formation.

Topics of conversationSo what are the current topics of the research conversation in the NLS? Where

is the research activity and where is it heading? This is the focus of the papers inthis collection. We can identify a number of areas where research effort has beenfocused:

community-based literacy practiceshome-school literacy practicesliteracy and schoolingacademic literacy practicesworkplace literacy practicesliteracy practices and policy discourses on literacy

These areas are informed by a number of issues which, in a sense, cut across allthe others: the impact of new technologies and media on literacy practices, thecontestation of what counts as knowledge, in an era of increasing globalisation(the new world/work order of Gee et al., 1996)the interactions of global and localin the shaping of literacy practices. We will consider each of these in turn.

Community-based literacy practicesOne of the the major thrusts of the NLS studies has been the investigation of

‘vernacular’ or non-dominant literacy practices, precisely those that are over-looked and ignored by the constructions of literacy elaborated by and withindominant institutions. Street carried out research in an Iranian village, at the timeof the national literacy campaign, and he found that there were literacies beingused in everyday life – by people who were regarded as ‘illiterate’ by the literacycampaigners – including a religious Qur’anic literacy and an adapted literacyused in market-place transactions. He argued that local literacies were invisibleto or ignored by literacy educators who were concerned about widespread ‘illit-eracy’ (Street, 1984).

Heath’s (1983) classic study can be understood as an investigation of vernacu-lar literacies in relation to the literacy expectations of schooling. Prinsloo andBreier (1996) examined the everyday and workplace literacy practices of margin-alised and educationally disenfranchised individuals and communities in thenew South Africa. Their work drew in part on Baynham’s attention to the role of

New Directions in Literacy Research 85

literacy mediators of local and dominant literacies, who assist communitymembers of linguistically marginal groups in dealing with the demands ofbureaucratic language and authority (Baynham, 1993, 1995). Barton and Hamil-ton (1998) in their ethnographic study of literacy practices in Lancaster, UKpainstakingly uncover and analyse the texture of the unobserved, daily literacyevents and practices of the community they studied.

Home–school literacy practicesA number of studies of everyday literacy practices in schools and in homes

have argued that there is evidence of significant variety and cultural specificity tothe early literacy practices of children across different social contexts:

Children from diverse sociocultural and economic backgrounds bring toclassrooms differing senses of the rules for using language and texts inparticular settings (Gee, 1990).The way meaning is built into text in school settings is more compatiblewith the way some children have learnt to make meaning and less compati-ble with the ‘ways of knowing’ of children from other backgrounds (Heath,1983).Schooling itself may have contributed to a narrow and rigid definition ofliteracy, as something apart from social dialogue and defined as a‘decontextualised knowledge validated through text performances’(Cook-Gumperz, 1986: 27; Dison, 1993; Street & Street, 1991).When schools teach literacy as a skill which is simply about coding andde-coding, they neglect to teach children how to construct meaningthrough texts in those particular ways that are favoured in schooling (Gee,1991).Misinterpretations of what children are doing and misrecognition of whatcommunicative resources they bring to schooling on the part of teacherstend to happen with reference to models of cultural deficit, where differ-ences are understood as absences (Freebody et al., 1995; Michaels, 1981).The traditions of literacy teaching – the texts that we teach and the modelsfor interacting around texts that we set up and encourage – are malleableand can be reshaped to include and capitalise on the kinds of differencesthat children bring to classrooms (Luke & Kale, 1997).

Literacy and schoolingIn the UK context NLS researchers are concerned that the new commitment

to teaching and testing ‘literacy skills’ might become a new medium for natu-ralising inequalities, by setting in place, under conditions of economic reces-sion, and in ‘post-Fordist’ and global market conditions, ‘a more explicitframework which justifies differential wealth and opportunities by appealing toscales of attainment which rank and order school leavers’ (Bourne, 1999). InSouth Africa a proliferating list of ‘unit standards’ is being generated by stan-dard-setting bodies. The unit standards are intended to be content-free andcontext-free descriptions of knowledge-skills which can be tested. The mostimmediately visible outcome is a massive uncertainty at the level of provision,evidence of ‘teaching to the test’, a ‘dumbing down’ of learning content and


curriculum overspecification. A similar pattern is described in Australia byFreebody (1999: 5):

Educators are being required to ‘teach and test’ ever more diligently themore obvious, quantifiable, generalisable and thus minimal features ofindividualist management of written script.

Academic literacy practicesLiteracy practice in tertiary institutions ha been a significant focus in recent

research (Jones et al., 1999; Lea & Stierer, 2000). Tertiary literacies is an attractiveresearch site for a number of reasons: there is an interesting relationship withresearch on disciplinary communities as well as on disciplinarity and knowledgeconstruction. The ethical and political commitment characteristic of NLSresearch is addressed in the contribution of such research to the development ofaccess for students, particularly from non-traditional backgrounds, into highereducation. Perhaps another attraction of tertiary literacies as a research focus isthat their scope is relatively well defined in contrast, for example, to communityliteracies, where the scope of the research can involve potentially any aspect ofthe subjects’ everyday life.

Literacy and workWorkplace literacy practices have received attention in a number of places,

most notably in Gowen (1992); Gee et al. (1996); Hull et al. (1996) in the USA; andin Australia in the work of Farrell (1997, 2000), O’Connor (1994) and Black (1995,1998). Kathryn Jones of the Lancaster group provides an account of thework-based literacy practices in Welsh and English of Welsh hill farmers (Jones,2000a, b). A number of the contributions to Prinsloo and Breier (1996) areconcerned with work-based literacy practices.

A crucial feature of these studies of workplace literacy practices is theembeddedness of literacy practices in particular contexts. They challenge the talkabout literacy in terms of basic skills and the urging of schools, vocationalprograms and adult literacy classes to teach ‘the basics’.

Most work has been done around the so-called ‘new workplaces’ of globalproduction, also known as high-performance workplaces, partly characterisedby the break-up of production and assembly work into relatively contained andself-monitoring cells or teams led by team leaders who are appointed from theranks of the workers and trained extensively in team leading and team-buildingpractices. Management literature describes these workplaces as sites whereconstant learning is said to be the central activity of the enterprise and talks of‘enchanted workplaces’, ‘self-directed work teams’ and ‘empowered workers’.However, NLS studies of such workplaces in the USA (Hull et al., 1996),Australia(Farrell, 1997, 2000; Black, 1998) and South Africa (Scholtz & Prinsloo, 2001) haveshown that while these new workplaces can be characterised as ‘literacy-rich’environments, where work has become increasingly textual, that the so-called‘workplace revolution’ is not about increasing the literacy skills of individualworkers. Processes of empowerment and skilling of individual workersremained very uneven and followed the dominant social fault lines of language,ethnicity, class and, at least partly, gender.


Literacy practices and policy discourses on literacyResearch in this area has been something of a growth area, in relation to the

increasing salience of literacy as a policy focus and locus of state intervention. Aswill be seen in a number of contributions to this collection, the question of whatcounts as literacy, how knowledge about literacy is authorised are not just theo-retical issues, but questions of hot debate in the media and in policy discussion.The understanding of literacy as a core basic skill that stands at the door to ratio-nal thinking, ‘higher order skills’ and ‘trainability’ is one that still dominatespolicy-making and system-building in educational provision across countries. Itis accompanied in contemporary times by a repetitive concern by central govern-ment with low or falling ‘literacy standards’ in national contexts. Researchers areable to draw on resources developed by their NLS colleagues to highlight contra-dictions, inconsistencies and absurdities in dominant policy perspectives onliteracy across national contexts. However, as some papers argue in this collec-tion, understandings of literacy as a core, socially neutral technology mostclosely associated with schooling is not just a policy error, but an attitude to liter-acy that is widespread and has real social effects.

Literacy practices, new technologies and mediaIt is something of a truism now to say that the communication environment,

and hence literacy practices, have been irrevocably altered by new technologiesand media, such as the Internet and e-mail, in ways that communications havebeen similarly altered in the past by the introduction of writing technologies,innovations such as printing, inventions such as the telegraph, the telephone andnow the mobile phone. Among a plethora of publications, there is a need to movebeyond the rhetoric and engage in sustained empirical work using an NLS meth-odology, to investigate some of the claims made for the impact of such technolog-ical innovations on daily literacy practices at home, school and work. The workof Snyder and others (Snyder, 1997;Hawisher & Selfe, 1999;Snyder & Lankshear,2000, and this volume) set the agenda in this area.

Structure of This CollectionThe papers in this collection make up a double issue of the journal and in some

ways the papers presented here do fall into two parts. The first part focuses moreon the research conversation that makes up the NLS, with contributions thatexamine it as a research field, illustrating its potential and possibilities throughcase studies of research and also point to some limitations and areas for possibledevelopment ( Barton, Freebody, Snyder, Thesen, Moss). Freebody’s paper,however, also sets out a number of issues to be taken up in the second part of thetheme issue.

Hammond’s paper marks a transition between the focus on research in theNLS and the engagement with policy. The subsequent papers (Hamilton, Kell &Lo Bianco) engage in different ways with the interface between literacy researchand literacy policy formation and evaluation. A number of papers in the secondpart of the theme issue (most notably Hamilton and LoBianco) close the circle byidentifying policy formation as a promising area for research using NLS method-ologies.


Barton’s paper outlines the ways that the NLS have emerged as a field. Hedraws on the distinctive work on literacy developed at Lancaster, mapping outthe formation and differentiation of the NLS as a research field.

Freebody’s paper revisits the epistemological bases for the NLS, in the distinc-tion between a natural science perspective on literacy and a human scienceperspective that emphasises literacy as purposeful sociocultural practice. Thisleads to a critique of the philosophies underpinning current unidimensionalassessment practices, which result in ‘an unmooring of literacy from purposefulsociocultural practice’. Freebody’s paper is informed by a criticalethnomethodology perspective, identified as we have seen by Gee as one of themovements theoretically synchronised with NLS work.

Snyder’s paper engages with constructions of literacy in a context of rapidtechnological change, drawing on a three-dimensional model of literacy: theoperational, the cultural and the critical. Her paper is illustrated with a casestudy of the Australian ‘Digital Rhetorics’ Project (Lankshear et al., 1997;Lankshear & Snyder, 2000) and with research on the redrawing of boundariesbetween the visual and verbal in forms of computer-mediated communication.

Thesen provides a case study of the introduction of multimodal texts into ahigher education curriculum, with a group of students characterised by differingdegrees of cultural capital. She points to the resilience of the written mode evenin situations when visual texts are on the curriculum and ways that the readingsof visual texts appear to privilege those who already possess cultural capital.

Moss, drawing on her research into children’s readings of media texts, usesBernstein’s (1996) distinction between vertical and horizontal discourses todistinguish between the diversity of vernacular literacy practices (horizontaldiscourses) and the developmental trajectories implied in the project of school-ing (vertical discourses) and argues for an increased focus on research intoschooled literacy practices drawing on NLS perspectives.

Hammond’s paper, as we suggested earlier, provides a transition pointbetween the papers in the first part of the collection, which largely focus onresearch and the papers in the second part of the collection which engage withissues of literacy policy. She provides a case study from Australia of the diver-gent interests in and constructions of literacy on the part of policy-makers andliteracy-researchers. In doing so, she picks up on the issues raised by Freebody inhis paper which points to crucial and deep-seated divergences in the question of‘what counts as literacy’. This sets the scene for a number of papers which focuson literacy policy and the process of policy-making.

Hamilton provides an analysis of the development of the International AdultLiteracy Survey (IALS) using a version of actor network theory to examine theprocesses through which institutional truths about literacy are created. Shedemonstrates two ways in which NLS theory can engage with policy develop-ment in assessment. The first, more straightforward way, is through providing avalidity check on the ways in which what is assessed relates to literacy uses incontext, picking up on the points made by Freebody in his paper aboutunidimensional literacy assessment. The second is through using the researchmethodologies of the NLS to investigate the processes of policy formation them-selves. The latter point is one that will be picked up in Lo Bianco’s paper.

Kell takes up a number of the issues raised in previous papers in an intricate


discussion of literacy policy developments in South Africa and critically reviewsthe potential of small-scale ethnographic research to impact on large scale socialprocesses such as policy formation. Using Fairclough’s notion of the commodifi-cation of educational discourses (Fairclough, 1992), she sees a commodificationof language and literacy in the new training frameworks

In the concluding paper in this collection, Lo Bianco makes an intriguing shiftfrom ‘policy on literacy ‘ to ‘the literacy of policy’ arguing that literacy research-ers and practitioners must learn the language of policy in order to be able to makeeffective interventions in policy formation. If we apply the three-dimensionalmodel of literacy, proposed by Snyder, Lankshear and others, to this process oflearning the language of policy, we come up with an operational dimension –learning to control and manipulate the language of policy; a cultural dimension –gaining control of the cultural practices through which policy-making operates;and a critical dimension – using rich and multi dimensional theories of literacyboth to critique and evaluate current unidimensional policies as well as to designecologically valid literacy policies.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Dr Mike Baynham, Professor of

TESOL, School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK([email protected]).

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