Graduate students from our Theories of Literacy course are sharing insights from our weekly sessions in weekly blog posts. They’ll rotate the responsibility throughout the fall 2025 semester, sharing how we’re making sense of the ideas that emerge in our time together.
Literacy studies is an ever-evolving field. As our understanding of literacy changes, this has ramifications on how we discuss and study these practices. Even just using the word “practices” carries weight in these conversations.
David Bloome and Judith L. Green’s article “The Social and Linguistic Turns in Studying Language and Literacy” takes a close look at the shift in how we think of literacy and the effect it has on discussions of it, as well as ethnographic research in classrooms. In addition to this, they talk about how these turns in literacy also affects how it functions in everyday life.
The act of defining literacy has always been a complicated one. For a substantial amount of time, it’s been very narrow. The focus was placed on just the act of reading and writing. Most still see literacy through such a lens. If you took the average person off the street and asked them what they considered literacy, that would be the answer you would get.
In our class this week, however, we looked at literacy from a wider lens. Together we traced a network of our interactions with literacy that brought us here to this grad seminar. There were the answers you might expect, such as early memories with reading. Many of the answers, however, were more socially inclined.
Board games came up, a medium that we associate more with community than reading. But even board games contain literacy! Games like Scrabble test your vocabulary and spelling, being the most obvious example of this. Other board games like Monopoly can teach reading as well as financial literacy.
Another common theme was the role of social interaction surrounding literacy. The act of reading or writing is often perceived as something insular. But whether because of a parent, teacher, or friends, the social component of literacy has a great effect on those lasting memories. We discussed books our parents read with us or discussions we had with professors about certain texts. Even writing with friends in a collaborative document combines social connection and literacy.
What our class demonstrated here was our understanding of ideological literacy. Bloome and Green define this as “the situated, contextualized use of written language by people as they interact with each other within the social institutions and social spaces in which they live their lives” (20). Literacy is not an activity centered around one’s individual experiences. The role of social interactions – who we talk to and engage with in the context of literacy – is needed.
Ideological literacy is an evolution from autonomous literacy. Autonomous literacy looks through a more black and white lens that establishes a divide between who is “literate” and who is “illiterate”. Instead of looking at uses, it treats literacy as a benchmark that individuals and societies should strive for to improve their station. There are some issues with this way of thinking. This concept of literacy as an achievable benchmark can create biases based on intelligence and the need to elevate the “literacy” of communities that have pre-existing literacy practices. Thus, the purpose of bringing literacy can reinforce the idea that one culture is inherently superior.
The ideological model of history is more cognizant of these intercultural differences. In the sphere of literacy education, it shies away from instilling these communities with the idea that there is only one accepted form of literacy. Rather, it adapts them for the community’s needs. This shift from autonomous literacy to ideological literacy turns from a cognitive and hierarchical based perspective on literacy to a more social and contextual one.
Alongside social turns, Bloome and Green also discuss the linguistic turn in literacy studies. Literacy and language are intertwined; without language, what is there to read? (Of course, literacy can exist in forms beyond just written language, but many definitions revolve around it.) Language is also social. It’s how we communicate with one another. But this can also be extremely contextual.
As Lourdes discussed in her blog last week, ethnographic research can come with the hurdle of being an outsider, but trying to understand things as an insider would. Bloome and Green use the term “languaculture,” a splice between language and culture, to help describe how interlocked the two concepts are when it comes to an ethnographer attempting to understand the literary practices and events of a community you’re studying.
When we think of how language is used, it can be simple to just think of people talking. Rather, it’s more complicated than that. Take a situation such as a classroom filled with one instructor and a group of students. This is a pre-established structure with its own rules and solid hierarchy. Every student and the instructor themselves is an individual actor in this situation. They each have their own motivations and preferences when engaging with others in this space, but are also responding to their own perceptions of what their compatriots are saying with their actions.
It may sound like a lot of words to explain what we see as normal interaction, but these views are important for ethnographers to consider when studying spaces like this. Nothing is entirely dependent on one factor. Texts, too, play an important part for this research. Acknowledging the previous view into literacy research helps these literacy practices come to life. This literacy-in-the-making weaves a complicated web from the author’s original intention to how a student uses that text. To fully trace that journey, all steps involved must be understood.
- Author’s Original Intent
- Text in Question
- Instructor Leading Discussion
- Discussion in Class Surrounding Text
- Student Participant
- Internal Reconstruction of Text
- External Reconstruction of Text
- Application of this Reconstruction
The final three steps, thus, are influenced by the instructor and other participants involved. Similar to the pattern of social interaction we found in our own network of literacy, tracing these anchor points in literacy-in-the-making is a major factor in sufficient ethnographic research. We do not learn to read or write in a vacuum. Even just looking at classrooms undermines the importance of literacy in all spheres of life. Understanding the construction and importance of literacy events makes the connections between them clear and thus can help researchers understand the depth of them. It is crucial to view this as putting these cultural insights into words, rather than finding them. While they already existed, what this research does is put a magnifying glass to them in the context of literacy studies.
Dissecting these two turns allows us to look at a method that opposes two forms of literacy that reflect everyday life. These two viewpoints of literacy are “the frame of commodification and marketization; and the frame of dialectics and dialogue” (Bloome and Green 27).
Commodification and marketization is, to look at it as a literacy metaphor, literacy as big business. Under this view, material literacy is defined by things that can be owned and can be denied from consumers. Meanwhile, marketization makes literacy into a purely capitalist skill. Owning more literacy is how you climb the social ladder, whether that be through employment or social prestige. Bloome and Green point out how this even worms its way in at professional education conferences. People are eager to get their hands on free books available at these events to better their own chances to educate their students.
Bradley brought our attention to this section in particular, which was the section of the article we spent the most time dealing with directly in our seminar. Our conversation turned to discussing academic articles primarily. Academia can feel so inaccessible, after all. On an access standpoint, a good amount of academic research is paywalled. For us grad students, our enrollment to a university enables us to access databases like JSTOR easily. But research that is funded by the public gets locked behind a paywall for most people. Add in that many of these articles are in dialogue with themselves, including this one, and it can feel hard to crack in on your own. If that same person you pulled aside on the street and asked what they thought literacy wanted to do research on their own, it would be hard for them to do so.
Even an innocuous choice like the word “non-trivial” in the context of language and literacy events had us scrambling. Hailey brought about the question of what counts as really trivial language. Since language is always intentional, does that make anything trivial? Julian brought up the argument of marketing language on a snack wrapper. It may mean something, but no one reads it. Is it the use or the intention?
Questions like this open a door to a real issue. Academic articles are neither available nor written for the public. We attempt to move past this view that aligns more with autonomous models of literacy that views it in a capitalistic mindset. Yet, even in these spaces, we struggle to really break free of this ingrained idea. So, what’s the alternative?
The opposition of this idea is dialectics and dialogue. This framework poses that any communicative act – written, oral, or signed – is inherently social. It exists within a social context, which is in itself part of a social system. Rather than a more individualistic view as the commodification and marketization framework offers, everything is layered. No act exists in total isolation. The real difference is how it poses changes to literacy. You can’t buy your way into being a literate person. Instead, through interaction with people, literacy is built up over time.
Finally, Bloome and Green discuss the implications this has on the future. They suggest that researchers need to be involved more in the spaces they are studying, as well as contemplating the dialectic framework of literacy. AKA, things that might seem like trivial uses of language might not be so trivial!
Now, to turn to my own thoughts about our seminar. During our conversation about commodification and marketization, I reflected on our early discussion about Scribner’s metaphors (which Tim goes more in depth about in his article). We discussed literacy as a state of grace, which ties in nicely to our conversation about this framework and its issues. The discussion turned to how anti-education sentiments push back against that metaphor. In my perspective, I saw these two as their own opposing forces.
On one hand, you have a push away from higher education because it is believed to corrupt the minds of young people (when in actuality it’s not the education and rather the break from insular experiences for many that cause so-called radicalization). On the other hand, you have what can feel like an impenetrable world of academia. Things like book-banning even tie into this idea. Libraries can be seen as a beacon for people to access books they might not otherwise be able to read. But when people rally around books that could challenge their worldview, commodification of literacy becomes a weapon to be wielded.
The argument of whether there is a literacy crisis between kids of this generation is one spun for every generation. But I think about my own network of literacy when hearing about stories like that. If your literacy anchors are built upon denial to what you want to read, how will that impact your relationship to literacy?
On that note, the questions I still have after this week’s class are:
- Bloome and Green discuss the importance of literacy anchors and what researchers need to know to understand literacy-in-the-making. But how much does literacy-in-the-making outside of the classroom need to be taken into account? How does this differ from the steps they laid out?
- Most examples that we brought up in making our network of literacies were positive experiences, or spurred us to be better? How can negative experiences impact our networks of literacy?
Bloome, David, and Judith L. Green. “The Social and Linguistic Turns in Studying Language and Literacy.” The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies, edited by Jennifer Rowsell and Kate Pahl, Routledge, 2015, pp. 19–34.
Allison Vogt is an English graduate student and writing tutor at California State University, Chico. Originally earning her bachelors’ in English Literature, her area of focus is now more oriented towards language and literacy studies. She enjoys Dungeons and Dragons, but she’ll find time to read for fun occasionally as well.