ABSTRACT
Until recently, the study of literacy was dominated by assumptions regarding the large consequences, for cognition and for society as a whole, of the acquisition of reading and writing. Psychologists in particular studied literacy in terms of the ‘problems’ of acquisition for individuals and the cognitive changes that occurred when ‘successfully’ mastered. While these studies continue, and in some cases still appear to dominate educational policy (cf. The National Literacy Strategy in the UK and No Child Left Behind in the US), a shift has taken place in recent years whereby emphasis in theory and research has been placed far more on understanding literacy practices in context, with greater caution regarding assumptions about the intrinsic nature or consequences of the medium. This more socially orientated approach, often referred to as the New Literacy Studies (Gee 1990), has been particularly influenced by those who have advocated an ‘ethnographic’ approach, in contrast with the experimental and often individualistic character of previous studies, many of which now appear ethnocentric and culturally insensitive. Within the New Literacy Studies, literacy is treated as a social practice rather than a set of ‘autonomous’ cognitive skills and it is argued that, in order to understand and to teach literacy, we need to know the contexts in which it is being used and the meanings attached to it in those contexts. Recent applications of this approach have addressed the reading and writing requirements of Higher Education and treated these as examples of literacy in practice applying the same methodological and theoretical frame to their analysis as to the literacies outside the academy; in other words academics have been looking at their own literacy practices with the same kind of detached and curious eye as they do the literacies of ‘other’ people with which they are less familiar.
