Approaches to Literacy

1. Approaches toLiteracy The area of literacy is often overlooked by both linguists and anthropologists.

2. The consequences of Literacy • Goody and Watt • Main point: the permanencey of documents lead to discovering that the past is not like the present • History is not a simple sequence of events but a succession of different eras with different cultural constructs. • Led to critical thought. • Critiqued by Brian Street

3. The evolution of writing • Schmandt-Besserat • Writing was more discovered than invented. • Series of coincidences.

4. Ideologically presupposition. The entailed set of linked unstated propositions based on ideological premises" e.g., "the strike of Leyland toolmakers today further weakened Britain's economic position." Intertextuality Texts draw on other texts, discourses (or generes) and adopt varying relationships toward them. Polysemy The text as multimeaninged, struggle over meaning, texts as arenas of struggle, See Volosinov 1973; Fiske 1987 Modality That part of the grammar which indicates the truthfulness, reliability or authoritativeness of an utterance. Modality shows a version of reality as the speaker/writer sees it or intends it to be seen by the hearer/reader. Reader positioning How the writer-text attempt to persuade the reader to take on a particular reading position. Pronouns very useful) Decoding positions Three hypothetical positions' for decoding The dominant hegemonic position (reader is within and accepts the writer's reference code). The negotiated code (reader is within the writers code but contests its appropriacy in this reading) The oppositional position (the reader is totally outside the writer's code. Teaching Critical Reading: Clark

5. Critical Language Skills • Paulo Freire: Literacy; reading the world and reading the word. • Norman Fairclough: Critical Language Awareness. • Deals with the impositions of the standard language.

6. The End