CHAPTER TWO: Theories and ethnographies of literacy 2.1 Introduction
2.5 The ideological model/the social practices theory of literacy
2.5.4 Key concepts in the social practices theory of literacy
2.5.4.1 Literacy practices
that are similar to ‘practice’ are ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’. For any practice to be enacted, three things need to be put together. These are knowledge, technology, and skill. Skill in this case is the act or behaviours that are required to apply the knowledge (Scribner &
Cole, 1981). Regular involvement in this activity will ingrain this practice into the thinking of the people involved, thus making it part of their communicative repertoire or discourse when dealing with that task.
If this understanding of practice is applied to literacy, it will be a repeated way of reading and writing in a recurrent literacy event (Barton, 1994). The knowledge of this practice will be that which is required to accomplish the activity or to participate in the literacy event. The technology will be a pen and paper or any other appropriate surface or media depending on the activity. The skill is the ability to read and write, and all that is required in the act of coding and decoding a language on/or from paper or any other media.
Therefore, whenever and wherever this activity/literacy event happens again, the three (knowledge of activity, pen and paper, and skill of reading and writing required for that activity) will come together to reproduce the same generic pattern associated with that activity. This is because the dynamics of bringing the three elements together reproduce the pattern associated with the literacy event. This pattern then becomes the practice, which must be learnt by all those who engage in that particular activity, and from which they draw in any reading and writing associated with that activity. The talking that comes with the putting together of this activity and the pattern it reproduces, constitute a part of the discourse that informs the literacy practice that relate to that literacy event. As already discussed in many sections above, different activities generate different literacy practices or regular patterns of reading and writing that can be identified and associated with a particular activity and these practices in turn identify the activity.
When discussing the concept of practice above, the concept of ‘literacy practice’ was mentioned. This is the defining concept in the social practices theory of literacy.
According to Street, ‘literacy practices’ refers to the "behaviour and the social and cultural conceptualisations that give meaning to the uses of reading and/or writing"
(Street, 1984 cited in Prinsloo & Breier, 1996a, p. 18). It is the broader cultural ways of using literacy that people bring to literacy events and which give meaning to the events (Barton, 1991, 1994; Barton & Hamilton, 1998, 2000; Street, 2000a). Using the concept of ‘literacy practice’ is important for understanding literacy in different contexts, and how it relates to different cultural practices in different social and economic institutions in which literacy is used like schools, church and bureaucracy (Welch & Freebody, 1993).
Literacy practices are not observable units of behaviour because they "involve values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships…this includes people's awareness of literacy, constructions of literacy, and discourse of literacy" (Barton & Hamilton, 2000, p. 7).
Literacy practices consist of literacy events as their practical and visible manifestations.
In other words, literacy practices can only be inferred from literacy events, because literacy practices are the ideological preconceptions related to a literacy event, which give it meaning (Street, 1993b).
Literacy practices link literacy with the social institutions/activities in which they are embedded. They define what people do with literacy. Literacy practices hold and define the discourse practices of the institutions with which they are associated. Literacy
practices connect the different individuals in an institution into one community of practice (Gee, 1998, Wenger, 1998). In other words, it is what enables different people in one institution to communicate with each other within the same realm of meaning making. In doing that, literacy practice becomes a social process that mediates interpersonal social relationships beyond its communicative purpose (Herbert & Robinson, 2001; Hodge, 2003). “Membership in a community is partly defined by knowing and participating in these practices” (Barton, 1991, p. 8).
Literacy practices operate at different levels with sub-levels within a particular practice.
For example, legal literacy practices are a combination of different literacy practices that are associated with different sites of generating legal documents such as compiling a police report, construction of courtroom records, interpreting and arguing the law and a host of other related activities in which such writing is involved. These legal literacy practices associated with the law constitute different practices that come together as legal literacy practice (Holme, 2004). This is best explained by the concept of ‘community of practice’ that brings together people of common interest within a single or shared communicative practice or a discourse community. Communicative practices are collective and related ways of making meaning in reading and writing to serve a particular purpose or realm of meaning making.
In a literate society, a single individual may participate in a number of activities supported by different institutions that give rise to different literacy practices. For example, as individuals move from home to the market and from the market to the church in the course of living their daily lives, they encounter different literacy practices in the process.
Specifically, the individual will be engaged in different literacy events that fall under
different literacy domains (this concept of literacy domains is explained below) (Holme, 2004).
Literacy practices also change with time although they provide some measure of stability that limits extreme variation in practice over a short period of time (Holme, 2004). These changes are brought about by changes in technology, media or in the mode of production that take place in the institutions within which a particular literacy practice exists. When changes do happen, it means unlearning of old practices and learning new ones to ensure continued participation. Such learning may take place informally, non-formally, or formally. This makes literacy learning not a once and for all affair but an everyday life process (Brandt, 2001).
To study literacy using the concept of literacy practices is about understanding not only how people use literacy in their day to day lives but also, what they make of what they do with literacy, the value they place on it and the ideology that surrounds its use in
accomplishing a particular activity. The concept of practice “implies both doing and knowing” what you are doing, it allows for the study of literacy in use, and as an aspect of social life (Baynham, 1995, p. 39).
Since the concept of literacy practices is responsible for reproducing the behaviour, format and ways of doing and understanding a given text genre11 involved in a literacy event, it cannot be the basic unit of analysis in literacy research. Therefore, this concept of literacy practices can only be understood through inference, interpretation or observing literacy events that regularly unfold in people’s everyday lives in a given domain of literacy.(Barton and Hamilton, 1998, 2000).