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Language and Literacy: A Socio-cultural Perspective
Edited by : Theresa Austin and Reddad Erguig
2012 / Issue 29-30

Theresa Austin and Reddad Erguig
Introduction

Rachel Grant  
Double Dutch as Community Cultural Wealth in the Writing of African American Middle School Girls

Sandra Abrams
Powerful gaming structures and practices: Video games, situated language, and cultural contexts

Nicole Beeman-Cadwallader
Teacher, What is a Jiko?: Scientific Literacy and Curricular Goals in Contemporary Kenya

Debra Mayes Pane 
A Critical Microethnographic Analysis of the Relationship between Classroom Interactions and Literacy as a Social Practice

Donna Bain Butler
The Use of Language and Literacy Strategies in L2 Academic Legal Writing Context

Reddad Erguig and Laura A. Valdiviezo
Islam and the Everyday Life Literacy Practices of Newly Literate Moroccan Women

Angeles Clemente, Michael J. Higgins, William Sughrua and Mario López-Gopar 
Ethnographic Encounters with Cultural Practices of Literacy in the State Prison of Oaxaca

Theresa Austin and Ekaterina Ites 
Testing /assessing literacies: How do educators build useful knowledge about second language learners’ development?

 
 
Sociolinguistic Variation in Arabic: A New Theoretical Approach

Rachel Grant

Abstract

    In the first article, "Double Dutch as Community Cultural Wealth in the Writing of African American Middle School Girls", Rachel Grant argues that to reduce discrepancies in the performance of mainstream students and racially and linguistically diverse students more sophisticated understandings need to be developed about how race and gender are implicated in, and are constructed through, literacy engagement in the US. Grant focuses on the academic achievement of African American females whose academic success is influenced by similar factors that affect their male counterparts. Her research with six urban students describes cultural funds of knowledge manifested in a practice of chanting and jumping rope. Grant shows how this meaningful connection to their lives can engage learners in “school-like” literacy. A cultural practice that requires skilled physical and oral language performances is paralleled by the need to develop academic discourse through coordinated thinking and written expression. Extending a non-dominant cultural practice into academic literacy creates a space to communicate through writing about these experiences and its relation to their lives. Although the participants in the study had classroom experiences that did not support their participation as learners, Grant discusses how instruction could be changed by tapping into cultural practices to better engage students from historically marginalized groups. She convincingly illustrates how having meaningful experiences to communicate about their own lived experiences and in the language most familiar to them can be extended through an academic literacy that can also be similarly learned and valued.

 
 
Powerful gaming structures and practices: Video games, situated language, and cultural contexts  
Sandra Abrams

Abstract

    In the second article, “Powerful gaming structures and practices: Video games, situated language, and cultural contexts”, Sandra Abrams illustrates how power relations affect the literate participation of teen members of a US. video gaming community in New Jersey. Her article describes how video gaming activity in a public library becomes an out-of-school venue for literacy development that calls on students to engage multimodally with video texts. Abrams draws on Foucault’s notion of surveillance operating from a panoptican to explain how power relations are complexly developed across face-to-face and virtual contexts in gaming communities. In her on- going observational study, she describes the process of normalization that regulates learning opportunities for gamers as their skill level leverages power among its members. 

 
 

Teacher, What is a Jiko?: Scientific Literacy and Curricular Goals in Contemporary Kenya
Nicole Beeman-Cadwallader

Abstract

     When western science is incorporated into the curriculum in countries where there are competing forms of indigenous knowledge, in what ways does this curriculum impact learning locally? In the third article, Nicole Beeman-Cadwallader addresses this issue in “Teacher, What is a Jiko?: Scientific Literacy and Curricular Goals in Contemporary Kenya.” As a science educator and researcher, Beeman-Cadwallader conducts an ethnographic study to discern the extent to which Kenya educators incorporate local science knowledge relevant to what they define as scientific literacy. She also examines the ways in which a “cross-cultural scientific literacy serves “to improve the well-being and social action of its citizenry.” Using complementary analytic procedures, thematic analysis and narrative structural analysis of interviews, Beeman--Cadwallader reveals the conflicts in the curriculum between valuing local knowledge yet bestowing higher priority on knowledge that is nationally tested. This conflict systematically impacts how the institution prepares teachers and the curriculum’s ability to prepare learners for contributing to Kenyan agricultural future progress. The tensions produced by this conflict create a science literacy that produces less for agricultural development and more attraction for living in urban centers developed by former colonizers. 

 
 
A Critical Microethnographic Analysis of the Relationship between Classroom Interactions and Literacy as a Social Practice
Debra Mayes Pane

Abstract

    In the fourth article, "A critical microethnographic analysis of the relationship between classroom interactions and literacy as a social practice", Debbie Pane examines a critical disciplinary moment within a larger set of U.S. teacher and student literate practices in which a science teacher in an alternative education school, who rarely uses exclusionary discipline, suddenly expels a student from class. To address the issue of how cultural norms about legitimate behavior shape who gains access to literacy, Pane carries out nine stages of critical microethnographic data collection and analysis to develop a deeper understanding of one case as a part of a larger case study of literacies-in-contact. The struggles she uncovers and their consequences draw attention to broader societal structures, learning processes, and social and academic identity reproduction. The study shows "since unequal power relations and exclusionary discipline were at their height in the language arts classrooms" and because "classrooms thrived on unequal power relations and did not incorporate students’ literacy and cultural practices into educational practices", there is a strong need for "policy language that incorporates the historical, political, and sociocultural nature of reading texts wherein readers engage 'with different types of literacy events, for different purposes, and with different results'". The study also stresses the need to reconsider conceptions which view "alternative education schools as a place to hold students deemed disruptive, delinquent, multiply-disabled, and bad in general.” Pane advocates a more visionary agenda that would promote “thinking transformatively about how to develop critical communities of literacy as a social practice in the context of disciplinary alternative education and student populations".

 
 
The Use of Language and Literacy Strategies in L2 Academic Legal Writing Context  
Donna Bain Butler  

Abstract

    In the fifth article, "The use of language and literacy strategies in L2 academic legal writing context", Donna Bain Butler presents empirical research describing one African student's use of language and literacy strategies in academic writing for American law school. This case study demonstrates that academic writing is not one single universal set of cognitive skills but a set of practices which are socially contextualized. Pane focuses on socio-cultural context in the United States where it is taught, acquired, and used in a Master of Laws (LL.M.) program. The study "views scholarly L2 legal writing as developmental learning in two domains - language and law" and as "socialized cultural practice when the L2 legal writer learns from (a) formative assessment provided by the writing teacher-researcher, and (b) self-assessment provided by quality checks at each stage of writing".

 
 
Islam and the Everyday Life Literacy Practices of Newly Literate Moroccan Women   
Reddad Erguig and Laura A. Valdiviezo  

Abstract

    In the sixth article, "Islam and the Everyday life literacy practices of newly literate Moroccan women", Reddad Erguig and Laura A. Valdiviezo offer a case study of the everyday practices of six newly-literate Moroccan women who attended literacy classes in Rabat, Morocco. Their theoretical frame draws on New Literacy Studies (NLS) and uses ethnographic methods to explore women’s life history as well as their literacy attitudes in the aim of offering an account of their local literate practices. The authors stress the fact that religion is (i) a strong impetus for the women to acquire literacy and (ii) a significant factor to further developing their literacy practices. Participants use their newly acquired literacy to self-regulate their interpretation of the Koran and praying. In addition to showing how a literacy program may be relevant to the real life needs of students, the study supports findings of recent research on the embedded nature of literacy practice and the influence of religion on literate behavior outside the school setting. Although their findings demonstrate that the six female participants draw on the literacy skills they have acquired in the adult literacy class to serve largely expected functions, several also use literacy in original ways. The spread of literacy functions to other domains corroborates findings of past research conducted in newly literate communities and social groups where new literacy functions are developed creatively to serve unanticipated functions.

 
 
Ethnographic Encounters with Cultural Practices of Literacy in the State Prison of Oaxaca  
Angeles Clemente, Michael J. Higgins, William Sughrua and Mario López-Gopar  

Abstract

    In the seventh article, "Ethnographic encounters with cultural practices of literacy in the state prison of Oaxaca ", Angeles Clemente, Michael J. Higgins, William Sughrua and Mario López-Gopar examine the ways inmates learn to negotiate incarceration and literacy in the state prisons of Oaxaca, Mexico. This ethnographic study of a creative writing class that the authors taught at the Santa María Ixcotel prison in Oaxaca is concerned with the ways in which the inmate-students affectively deal with their imprisonment and with the social consequences of developing literacy; namely learning to encode their lives through poems and short stories. The authors examine the poems and also reflect on the overall experience of the inmates as they took the creative writing course. The authors discovered a co-productive or coeval relationship between themselves as teachers and researchers and the inmates as students and participants. This coevalness enables the inmate-students to relate to imagined communities through which they could challenge assumptions about the production of knowledge as well as contest the hegemony of coloniality and the colonial difference.

 
 
Testing /assessing literacies: How do educators build useful knowledge about second language learners’ development?  
Theresa Austin and Ekaterina Ites  

Abstract

    In “Testing /assessing literacies: How do educators build useful knowledge about second language learners’ development?” Theresa Austin and Ekaterina Ites article focus on meeting the needs of responsible teachers in the US and other locations who take a role in defining accountability for learning. They describe an on-going participant observation study that documents how teachers develop inquiries into local testing and assessment practices. Together, they critically analyze how language and content are represented in multimodal assessments to understand the language, literacy and cognitive demands of tests and assessments used in public schools. They collaborate in order for teachers to develop useful practices and policies that address multiple stakeholders’ demands to increase learning. To succeed in testing, teachers need skills for discerning and managing the literacies used in test-making and test-taking. Because L2 learners are often misrepresented in standardized test results, their teachers are particularly vulnerable. As such, the focus of the authors is on both test-making and test-taking literacies, and their implications for the testing of L2 professional literacies.