Literacies, Global and Local (AILA Applied Linguistics Series (Aals), Volume 2)

The articles collected in this volume draw on or relate to a body of work that has become known as the 'New Literacy Studies' (NLS), which studies literacy as situated semiotic practices that vary across sites in specific ways that are socially shaped. The collection offers a body of empirically and theoretically based papers on literacy ethnography as well as providing engagements with critical issues around literacy and education. The articles offer complementary perspectives on research and theory in literacy studies and include research perspectives from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, as well as North and South America. The researchers are all concerned to take the work of the New Literacy Studies further by expanding on its conceptual resources and research sites.

“This collection is a reminder that while educational policy founders between the macro and the micro, the global and the local - the futures of literacy are being made and remade by the likes of UK migrant children negotiating new identities, by Nepalese women reading and writing their lives for the first time, by middle class kids playing videogames, and in the street talk and artistry of children in the townships of South Africa.”

Table of contents

 

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction: Renewing literacy studies Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham	1–13
Part I. Literacy and power: Aligning literacy learners with dominant discourses and practices	15
1. Globalised literacy education: Intercultural trade in textual and cultural practice Peter Freebody and Jill Freiberg	17–34
2. To seem and to feel: Engaging cultural artefacts to "do" literacy Lesley Bartlett	35–50
3. Being a new capitalist mother Kathy Pitt	51–70
Part II. Local and global: Taking hold of literacy	71
4. Habitus in children's multimodal text-making: A discussion Kate Pahl	73–91
5. Fateful literacy: New meanings, old ideologies, and some unexpected consequences of Nepali love letter writing Laura M. Ahearn	93–116
6. Children's games as local semiotic play: An ethnographic account Mastin Prinsloo	117–133
Part III. Research tools: Conceptual resources for literacy study	135
7. Learning in semiotic domains: A social and situated account James Paul Gee	137–149
8. Assembling "Skills for Life": Actor-network theory and the New Literacy Studies Julia Clarke	151–169
Part IV. Literacy practices in time and space	171
9. Elite or powerful literacies? Constructions of literacy in the novels of Charles Dickens and Mrs Gaskell Mike Baynham	173–192
10. Beyond "here's a culture, here's a literacy": Vision in Amerindian literacies Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza	193–213
Index	215–218

Approved by Englishcology