Literacy Practices in Transition

Perspectives from the Nordic Countries

Anne Pitkänen-Huhta, Lars Holm, Anne Pitkänen-Huhta, Lars Holm

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847698391
• eBook ISBN: 9781847698421
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Educational Policy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Literacy Practices in Transition explores the connections between local, situated literacy practices and global processes of mobility in the geographical space of the Nordic countries, an example of contemporary mobile societies. The detailed empirical analyses show how these connections affect individuals, practices and policies; how the global and local meet in discourses and practices and how people need to (re)negotiate their way in the complex and messy spaces in which they move. The volume challenges current trends in the global standardization of language and literacy education. Instead, it promotes the idea of literacy as a multiple, multilingual, multimodal and constantly contestable and negotiable phenomenon, which calls for the development of language and literacy education that is sensitive to the needs and experiences of the individual actors.

Part 1

Literacy and Identity in Transition

Introduction

This part focuses on literacy in transition from the perspective of identities. The chapters in this volume take a postmodernist and post-structuralist view of identity as discursively constructed and undergoing a process of constant emerging and becoming. This indicates that identity is not only a matter of ‘who we are’ but also concerns ‘what we might become’ (Man, 2010: 124). This view of identity makes it possible for the authors to analyze a person’s speech, writings and doings with and around texts as a marker of identity that relates to specific and competing discourses. Language and literacy practices thus are not only a matter of fulfilling communicative functions but are also acts of identity, which bear social meaning and are produced in the context of diverse relations of power. We perform our selfness – or who we are – through the way we use – and are allowed and requested to use – language and literacy.

The chapters in this part show that when people move – both locally and globally – they encounter new discourse patterns and have to construct and perform new forms of personal and cultural identity in order to come to terms with the new practices and discourses they encounter and to establish some kind of membership in the new community (see also Norton, 2000). The process of identity formation is thus a process that is closely related to, and is transformed and negotiated across, time and space. Examining identity issues in a time of rapid global change is thus a central research challenge for literacy research which draws on post-structuralist and postmodern theories.

Research on issues of identity has lately been extended significantly through narrative research. In Chapter 1 in this part, Golden and Lanza contribute to this body of research in their analysis of adult migrants’ narratives on language learning and literacy. Wedin, in Chapter 2, focuses on the role of literacy in the negotiation and construction of identity by unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, and shows – like Golden and Lanza – that migrants have agency and refuse to be constructed and categorized as victims; rather, they use the resources available to them to navigate in a complex setting and to construct and perform identities. Bagga-Gupta’s research on identity construction – Chapter 3 in Part 1 – approaches the subject from another perspective, focusing on how identities and languages – or language varieties – are made visible or invisible in social practices and policy-textual worlds across time and space.

References

Man, J.L.C. (2010) Classroom discourse and the construction of learner and teacher identities. In M. Martin-Jones, A.M. de Meija and N.H. Hornberger (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Vol. 3: Oral Discourse and Education (2nd edn, pp. 121–134). New York: Springer.

Norton, B. (2000) Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change. Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education.

1 Narratives on Literacies: Adult Migrants’ Identity Construction in Interaction

Anne Golden and Elizabeth Lanza

Introduction

The ways in which people use and evaluate reading and writing are embedded in conceptions of knowledge and identity (Prinsloo & Baynham, 2008), while narratives provide insight into views of the self and other within a cultural context, and hence identity. The relationship between narrative and identity can be perceived as operating at various levels, as De Fina (2003) points out, including the use of narrative resources identifying the speaker as a member of a specific community, the use of stories through which social roles are negotiable and the use of the negotiation of membership into communities that share common beliefs and values. Among these common beliefs and values are ideological stances toward literacy. In this chapter, we will address the issue of identity construction that occurs in the presentation and positioning of self in social experiences related to literacy and language learning in the narratives of migrants to Norway. As migrants encounter new languages and cultures, they also encounter new dimensions to literacy, either initial literacy or further literacy in a new language. Migrants’ narratives inevitably involve ideological stances toward language learning and literacy and are thus fruitful sites for investigating identity construction in interaction.

Literacy is here understood in line with ‘New Literacy Studies’ as ‘situated social practices embedded within relations of culture and power in specific contexts’ (Prinsloo & Baynham, 2008: 2). Construing literacy as (a set of) social practices, studies within this perspective emphasize ‘what people do with literacy’ (Barton & Hamilton, 2000: 9) and thus encompass the negotiations of selves within these different relations. Hence literacy practices involve values, attitudes, ideologies and social relationships – in sum, how people in a particular culture construct literacy and how they talk about literacy and make sense of it. According to Street (1993), literacy practices are not observable units of behaviour since they involve values, attitudes, feelings and social relationships, including people’s awareness of literacy, constructions of literacy and discourses of literacy. Literacy events, however, involve reading and writing, and the conception of events stresses the situated, contextualized nature of literacy, that is that literacy always exists in a sociocultural context (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Lewis et al., 2007).

Through the lens of narratives of personal experience in conversational interaction, we will investigate various ways through which adult migrants position themselves and provide ideological stances towards language learning and literacy, and thus construct identities. We will examine the choice of narratives the adult migrants introduce into an interaction and the linguistic resources the individual employs in the performance of the narratives in interaction. Both language learning and literacy are critical in a postmodern text-based society like Norway, and success in these domains empowers individuals, providing them with added social capital. We will explore these issues through an interactional analysis involving highly skilled migrants with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

In the discussion that follows, we first present the notion of identity that motivates our study and in particular the issue of identity in narrative. Stance-taking, agency and categorization are important components in identity construction and will be brought up in this regard. Then we present current research on literacy that focuses on identity and narrative. Subsequently, we present the database that ultimately forms the core of our analysis. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our results for language education of understandings of complex blendings of cultural and linguistic diversity in communities and institutions, and of new cultural identities and practices.

Identity in Narrative

A recurring theme in narrative inquiry, framed within a post-structuralist approach to the study of the self and the other, is the notion of identity, or rather identities (Bamberg et al., 2007; Benwell & Stokoe, 2006). The individual can negotiate and construct many identities along various social axes, including ideological stances to literacy (Lanza & Svendsen, 2007). The approach to the study of identities taken in this chapter is a constructionist one in which identities are perceived as negotiated and emergent in interpersonal communication – the study of how identity emerges at various analytical levels and how these resources gain social meaning (cf. Bucholtz & Hall, 2005).

Narratives structure our experience, our knowledge and our thoughts (Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001: 1) and provide a window to the study of identity. Emphasizing the constructionist nature of identity, Benwell and Stokoe (2006: 138) underscore the role of narrative in this process, portraying

… identity as performed rather than as prior to language, as dynamic rather than fixed, as culturally and historically located, as constructed in interaction with other people and institutional structures, as continuously remade, and as contradictory and situational…. Thus the practice of narration involves the ‘doing’ of identity, and because we can tell different stories we can construct different versions of self.

The sociolinguistic literature on narrative has been highly influenced by Labov and Waletsky (1967) and the ensuing reformulations in Labov (1972) with an emphasis on a closed temporal order in discourse and with a focus on the narrative monologue, the so-called ‘big stories’ or canonical form of narratives. More recent approaches, referred to as a new narrative turn, have taken stock of this approach by examining ‘small stories’, or non-canonical forms of narratives – narrative fragments or snippets of talk (Georgakopoulou, 2007). A dimensional approach to the study of narrative proposed already by Ochs and Capps (2001) covers the span between the ‘big’ and the ‘small’ stories in which a continuum of possibilities is outlined for five different dimensions of narratives: tellership, tellability, embeddedness, linearity and moral stance. The Labovian approach has been anchored at one end of the continuum, for example including ‘one active teller, highly tellable account, relatively detached from surrounding talk and activity, linear temporal and causal organization, and certain, constant moral stance’ (Ochs & Capps, 2001: 20). More recent approaches to the study of narrative include other possibilities at various points on the continuum and hence allow for a more in-depth study of emergent identity in interaction. Small stories are also called narratives-in-interaction (Georgakopoulou, 2006), and this term underpins the idea that these stories are not merely isolated fragments in the interaction but that they are inherent to the activity or performance. Baynham (2011) highlights the importance of taking such small stories into account in interviews in addition to the range of non-canonical narrative types (generic/iterative, future/hypothetical and negative).

Identity construction in narrative has also been studied through a closer look at the categorization strategies a narrator employs, as ‘self-identities are … often built on the basis of opposition or contrast with others’ (De Fina, 2003: 139). In this regard, we may ask what kind of categories are used for self and other description and which ones are the most salient. Moreover, as narratives are often built around actions, we may investigate what kinds of actions and reactions (and implicitly what kinds of values and norms) are associated with those categories. This approach is particularly fruitful for investigating identity construction in relation to language learning and literacy as migrants usually have first-hand experience with these challenges and thus have many stories to tell that involve both literacy events and stories with evaluations of their own and others’ success and failure. The focus in our analyses is on how migrant adults talk about, and make sense of, language learning and literacy and hence how they talk about and make sense of themselves and others in particular settings. Autobiographical narratives (cf. Pavlenko, 2007) are indeed important sites for identity construction as they can provide an opportunity to the speaker for negotiating an identity of empowered agency in discourse. Agency is an interesting dimension to the study of identity as it i...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Literacy Practices in Transition: Setting the Scene
• Part 1: Literacy and Identities in Transition
• Part 2: Local Practices in Transition
• Part 3: Policies and Practices in Transition
• Afterword On the Move: Transitions in Literacy Research