Socio-Cultural Approaches to Literacy (Literacies)

There has emerged, over the last decade or so, a fairly cohesive body of work centered around a socio-cultural approach to literacy (e.g., Cazden 1988, Cook-Gumperz 1986, Gee 1990, Graff 1987, Heath 1983, Pattison 1982, Scollon and Scollon 1981, Street 1984). This work argues that the traditional view of literacy as a private mental possession which can be quantified and measured in terms of discrete decontextualized skills is deeply inadequate. To see why this is so, consider the following simple argument centered around the notion of ‘reading” (Gee 1989).