Situating Literacy Within Traditions of Communicative Competence

This paper investigates some of the affinities between the traditions of communicative competence and literacy studies by tracing back twenty-five years to the early calls for an ethnography of communication. In this decade, literacy studies have utilized ethnographic methodology, keeping the tradition alive and flourishing. The paper also shows how communicative competence theory, in more recent times, has branched into a communicative approach to second language pedagogy. In doing so, the tradition has mingled both ‘psycho-’ and ‘socio-’ views of language. Looking into the ways scholars have characterized literacy as a field, particularly through ‘autonomous’ and ‘ideological’ models, offers a window for viewing similar strands in applied linguistics.