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Socio-Cultural Approaches to Literacy (Literacies)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2008

James Gee
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Extract

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 ‘reading” (Gee 1989).

Type
Foundations of Literacy
Information
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , Volume 12 , March 1991 , pp. 31 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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