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Socio Cultural Approaches To Literacy J. Gee
Socio Cultural Approaches To Literacy J. Gee
Socio Cultural Approaches To Literacy J. Gee
James Gee
There has emerged, over the last decade or so, a fairly cohesive body of
work centered around a socio-cultural approach to literacy (e.g., Cazden 1988,
Cook-Gumperz 1986, Gee 1990, Graff 1987, Heath 1983, Pattison 1982, Scollon
and Scollon 1981, Street 1984). This work argues that the traditional view of
literacy as a private mental possession which can be quantified and measured in
terms of discrete decontextualized skills is deeply inadequate. To see why this is
so, consider the following simple argument centered around the notion of "read-
ing" (Gee 1989).
To go one step further: No one would say anyone could read a given text
if he or she did not know what the text meant. But there are many different
levels of meaning one can give to or take from any text. And this point does not
just apply to "fancy" texts like poems, novels, legal briefs, political tracts, and
religious texts. For example, consider the (mundane?) warning below from a
bottle of Tylenol (Gee 1989):
WARNING: Keep this and all medication out of the reach of children.
As with any drug, if you are pregnant or nursing a baby, seek the advice
of a health professional before using this product. In the case of acciden-
tal overdosage, contact a physician or poison control center immediately.
31
32 JAMES GEE
This text gives rise to a whole host of questions: Why is the Tylenol
company telling us about medicines in general ("all medication," "as with any
drug"), not just their own? Why does the warning address me (a male) as a
"you" who might be pregnant? Why does the warning use the (non-existent)
word "overdosage," instead of the perfectly good "overdose"? What do I do if
my overdose wasn't "accidental," and why does the warning refer to "accidental
overdosage" not just simply to any "overdosage"? If (as the bottle says else-
where) eight pills in 24 hours is the maximum dosage, does "immediately" in the
last line mean I should rush down to poison control if I have had ten pills in 24
hours? Depending upon how you answer these questions, and a host of others,
you will "read" the warning differently.
When this is done, something odd happens: the practices of such social
groups are never just literacy practices. They always also involve ways of
talking, interacting, thinking, valuing, and believing. Moreover, when one looks
at the practices of such groups, it is next to impossible to separate anything that
stands apart as a literacy practice from other practices. Literacy practices are
almost always fully integrated with, interwoven into, constituted part of, the very
texture of wider practices that involve talk, interaction, values, and beliefs
(Bruner 1990, Gee 1989; 1990, Guerra 1991, Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines 1988,
Willinsky 1990).
How does one acquire a Discourse? (We all have many.) It turns out that
much that is claimed, controversially, to be true of second language acquisition
(e.g., Krashen 1985) is, in fact, more obviously true of the acquisition of Dis-
courses. Discourses are not mastered solely by overt instruction, but by encultur-
ation ("apprenticeship") into social practices through scaffolded and supported
interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse (Lave 1988,
Rogoff 1990). This is how native languages and initial home-based Discourses
are acquired. It is how we acquire all later, more public-oriented Discourses.
One can always ask about how much tension or conflict is present
between any two of a person's Discourses (Rosaldo 1989). Some degree of
conflict and tension (if only given the discrete historical origins of particular
Discourses) will almost always be present. However, for some people, there are
more overt and direct conflicts between two or more of their Discourses than
there are for others. For example, many women academics feel conflict between
certain feminist Discourses and certain standard academic Discourses (e.g.,
traditional literary criticism); many Afro-Americans feel conflict between their
home- and community-based Discourses and mainstream school-based Discourses.
When such conflict or tension exists, it can deter acquisition of one or the other
or both of the conflicting Discourses, or, at least, affect the fluency of a mastered
Discourse on certain occasions of use (e.g., where other stressful factors also
impinge on the occasion, such as in an interview).
34 JAMES GEE
MIND IN SOCIETY
Over the last few decades there has been a "revolution" in the study of
cognition that has given rise to the "mega-discipline" of cognitive science (Leiber
1991). Cognitive science has, by and large, taken a computational view of the
mind (Sterelny 1990). On this view, the mind manipulates representations in
virtue of their form or structure, not their content or the contexts in which they
are relevant. For example, faced with the following syllogism—All swans are
white / Sally is a swan / Therefore Sally is white—humans (and computers), it is
argued, can conclude that it is valid, not in virtue of any thought about Sally and
swans, nor in terms of any interest or lack of it in swans, but in virtue of the
general schematic form of the propositions that make up the syllogism: All X's
are Y / a is X / Therefore a is Y.
Task 1. Drawn below are four cards. Each card has a letter on one side and a
number on the other—you can only see one side here, of course. Here is a rule
about these four cards:
If there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side.
Which card or cards must you turn over to decide whether the rule is true or
false?
SOCIO-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO LITERACY (LITERACIES) 35
Task 2. Imagine that you are the manager of a large department store. You have
to inspect sales receipts at the end of the day to ensure that they have been
properly filled out. The rule is:
If any purchase exceeds $30.00. the receipt must have the signature of the
department manager on the back. Which receipt or receipts must you check?
Humans tend to think quite well when something (like catching cheaters)
is at stake, and less well in more abstract and decontextualized settings. And,
indeed, work in neuropsychology, primatology, and anthropology is beginning to
suggest that social alliances, and the need to deceive and detect deception (calcu-
lation and not computation, one might say) was the driving evolutionary force
behind primate intelligence and the eventual development of specifically human
intelligence (Gazzaniga 1988, Lewin 1988).
Scribner and Cole argue that specific social practices of (Western-style) formal
schooling, not some generalized literacy skills, give rise to what our (not neces-
sarily someone else's) culture thinks of as "higher" cognitive functions, such as
abstract decontextualized thought (and writing). Furthermore, different sorts of
social practices give rise to different sorts of mental effects.
Scribner and Cole did not find that schooled, English-literate subjects,
many of whom had been out of school a number of years, differed from other
groups in their actual performance on categorization and abstract reasoning tasks.
They simply talked about them better, providing informative verbal descriptions
and justifications of their task activity. However, those who had recently been in
school did do better on the tasks, suggesting that both task performance and
verbal description of task performance improved as a result of schooled literacy,
but the former was transient unless practiced in the years after school.
There is another very important finding in the Scribner and Cole work.
Each literacy was associated with some quite specific skills. For example, Vai
script literacy was associated with specific skills in synthesizing spoken Vai in an
SOCIO-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO LITERACY (LITERACIES) 37
Scribner and Cole, on the basis of such evidence, opt for what they call
"a practice account of literacy." A type of literacy enhances quite specific skills
that are practiced in carrying out that literacy. Grandiose claims for large and
global cognitive skills resulting from literacy are not, in fact, indicated.
More recent work has tended to stress the connection between different
ways of thinking and larger cultural world views and values (not deficits). For
instance, Shweder (1991) shows that a concrete-relational style of thought (in
referring to persons) is typical of Oriyas in the town of Orissa in India, as
opposed to the abstract style typical of many Americans. Oriyas, asked to
characterize someone, are liable to say something like "She brings cakes to my
family on festival days," or "He curses at his neighbors," while Americans are
more liable to say "She is friendly," or "He is aggressive and hostile." This
difference, however, Shweder argues, is unrelated to variations (either between
the Oriyas and Americans or among the Oriyas themselves) in cognitive skill,
intellectual motivation, available information, linguistic resources, literacy,
economic or social status, or amount of schooling. "By elimination, we are led to
consider the way a culture's world view and master metaphors per se influence
the relationship between what one thinks about and how one thinks" (1991:129).
For Shweder, the Oriyas' context-dependent thinking is but one aspect of their
broader sociocentric "organic" (or holistic) view of the relationship of the
individual to society, as opposed to many Americans' "egocentric reductionist"
view of "person-in-society."
SOCIO-COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
The child always learns to use the cultural tool first and foremost in
social activity with others, social activity which has a characteristic "shape."
This "shape" (suitably transformed in the process) progressively becomes part of
the mental equipment of the child, who can then carry out the social activity "on
her own" "in her head" where it still ever bears the traces of the social as its site
of origin and continual renewal. (Often now Vygotsky is supplemented by
Bakhtin in regard to the inherently social nature of all language and thought: see
Holquist 1990, Wertsch 1985b.)
The key role of "expert guidance" can be seen in the research of Rogoff
and her colleagues (summarized in Rogoff 1990). In a planning task using a map
to plan a trip to get materials for a school play, nine-year-old children who had
collaborated with adults performed best; children who had worked with peers
trained to employ the optimal strategy in the task performed no better than those
who worked with untrained peers. Almost all the children working with adults
were active participants, observing or participating in decisions, whereas fewer
than half the children working with trained peers were active participants. The
presence of a partner may be irrelevant unless the partners truly work together in
problem solving.
practiced in real collaboration) are important for different goals (see also Forman
1987). Emphasis on expertise may be most important when the goal is the
development of new viewpoints and skills (Tudge 198S). Equality of status may
be important when the primary goal is to change someone's perspective on an
issue or problem. Thus, for example, Kruger (1988) found that eight-year-olds
who had discussed moral dilemmas with their peers progressed more in their
moral reasoning than did children who had discussed the dilemmas with their
mothers. The more interactive logical discussion of partners' ideas that
characterized peer conversations were positively correlated with the progress in
moral reasoning. In another study (Light and Glachan 198S), children working
together on a logic game made significant advances in skill from pre- to post-test
if they discussed their differences of opinion, but not otherwise.
One central issue that has energized a good deal of work on socio-cultural
approaches to literacies is the fact that a disproportionate number of children from
certain social groups—lower socio-economic and certain minority groups—fail in
school. The character of the failure problem can be seen particularly clearly if
we consider the Bristol Language Project in Great Britain, a longitudinal language
development study of a socio-economically representative sample of children born
in the Bristol area (Wells 1986). The school success of these children at age ten
related strongly to the children's preparedness for literacy upon entry to school as
judged by a "Test of Knowledge of Literacy" given at age five (the test examined
whether or not the child could turn a book right side up, tell the text from the
pictures, point to a word and a sentence, and name or sound out letters). The
results of this test, in turn, related directly to early preschool literacy practices in
the home (e.g., story book reading). Finally, both these literacy practices and the
results of "The Test of Knowledge of Literacy" related most directly to the
children's social class. If the children's early home-based preparedness for
literacy is still strongly predicting their success in school at age ten, then school
itself is not having much of an impact, save to make the rich richer and the poor
poorer. Current research coming out of the project continues to show the same
sort of picture: the success of these children at age fourteen in foreign language
classes correlates quite highly with their family backgrounds; e.g., social class
and parental education (Skehan 1989).
However, these three emphases become parts of one larger picture within
an overall socio-cultural approach to literacy. Discourses integrate values,
beliefs, and ways of acting and interacting with ways of using oral and often
written language. They are integrally connected to identities and often incorpo-
rate oppositions to other Discourses. They are acquired through apprenticeships
that allow learners to accomplish with others what they cannot yet accomplish
alone. Thus, acquiring a new Discourse always involves risk in terms of gaining
a new identity and possibly losing or undermining old ones; it also involves the
vulnerability of "looking incompetent" while engaged in guided participation in
the zone between what one can do only with others and what one can do alone.
If the apprentices do not trust the teachers who will socialize them into new
Discourses, no real development can take place (Delpit 1986; 1988, Erickson
1987). And trust requires that the teacher be sensitive to the apprentice's other
Discourses (especially home- and community-based Discourses), acknowledge the
oppositions and conflicts that exist among Discourses, and be aware that the
"same" words and actions mean differently in different Discourses (and mean
nothing outside of any Discourse).
CONCLUSION
problem in, and seriously changing, the institutions (schools) and the society that
perpetuates it. A socio-cultural approach to literacies replaces the three common-
sense assumptions above with the following socialized and historicized versions
(Gee 1990; in press, Mishler 1990): 1) thinking and speaking are functions of
social groups and their specific Discourses; 2) literacy is a social skill involving
the ability to take a functional part in one or more of a given social group's
Discourses, attained through guided participation and built on trust; and 3) a good
part of knowledge (what people have a right to claim to know) resides not in their
minds, but in the social practices of the groups to which they they belong.
Intelligence and aptitude, as measured by tests, are artificially constructed
measures of aspects of social practices taken out of context and attributed to
individuals.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Edelsky, C. 1991. With literacy and justice for all: Rethinking the social in
language and education. London: Falmer Press.
This volume differentiates mass culture (the products put out by capi-
talistic society) from popular culture (the ways in which people use,
abuse, and subvert those products to create their own meanings and resist
subordination). It also analyzes popular "texts" (e.g., socio-culturally
situated uses and decodings of ripped jeans, romances, tabloids, and
popular TV shows) to unveil class, race, and gender dynamics in modern
society. Fiske provides many examples of literacies embedded in
Discourses which are outside schools and mainstream contexts of power
and influence.
This volume surveys work on orality and literacy and develops a theo-
retical foundation for a socio-cultural approach to literacies rooted in the
notion of Discourses; as such, it stresses the inherent connections be-
tween literacies and ideologies. It goes on to develop a view of applied
linguistics in which literacy and educational issues are central and con-
tains many analyses of socially situated texts.
SOCIO-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO LFTERACY (LITERACIES) 43
Newman, D., P. Griffin and M. Cole. 1989. The construction zone: Working for
cognitive change in school. New York: Cambridge University Press.
This important study discusses how experiments can be done and evalua-
ted once psychology moves out of the laboratory and views cognition as
socially situated and rooted in the specific nature of concrete tasks and
activities. It also shows how lower-socioeconomic and minority students
come to master new school-based ways of thinking (such as classification)
which the teacher may assume to be already in place and which main-
44 JAMES GEE
stream students have already mastered. Just when these students are ready
to pass the fact-based tests rooted in these ways of thinking, which the
mainstream children have already passed, the teacher has moved on to a
new unit. Thus, these students both learn (without the teacher knowing it)
and fail.
Snow, C. E., et al. 1991. Unfulfilled expectations: Home and school influences
on literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Trueba, H. 1989. Raising silent voices: Educating the linguistic minorities for the
21st century. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House.
Willinsky, J. 1990. The new literacy: Redefining reading and writing in the
schools. New York: Routledge.
UNANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bleich, D. 1988. The double perspective: Language, literacy and social relations.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Bruce, B., J. P. Gee and S. Michaels. 1989. The Literacies Institute. Newton,
MA: Literacies Institute, Educational Development Center. [Literacies
Institute Technical Report, No. 1.]
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Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cosmides, L. 1989. The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped
how humans reason? Cognition. 31.1.187-276.
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Pattison, R. 1982. On literacy: The politics of the world from Homer to the age of
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Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston:
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Schieffelin, B. B. and E. Ochs (eds.) 1986. Language socialization across cul-
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Sterelny, K. 1990. The representational theory of mind: An introduction. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
Street, B. 1984. Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Taylor, D. and C. Dorsey-Gaines. 1988. Growing up literate: Learning from
inner city families. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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