Ways With Letters And Sounds

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy represents an important and innovative contribution to an area now sometimes referred to as “New Literacies Studies.” ¹ New Literacies Studies starts with a rather paradoxical claim: If you want to understand how reading and writing work, don’t look at them directly and in and of themselves. Rather, look directly at specific social practices in which specific ways of writing and reading are embedded. Furthermore, look at how these specific ways of reading and writing, within these social practices, are always integrally connected to specific ways of using oral language; specific ways of acting, interacting, thinking, believing, valuing, feeling; and specific ways of using various sorts of objects, tools, technologies, symbols, places, and times. All these “ways with words, deeds, and things” allow people to do certain things (and not others), to mean certain things (and not others), and to be certain kinds of people (and not others). ²