Language Learning 44:3, September 1994, pp. 529-533

Review

Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Brian Street (Ed.). Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993.

There appears t o be a nearly insatiable appetite these days for books with the word literacy in their titles.‘ Few, if any, ofthe authors or editors of these volumes, however, have the pedigree of the editor of the present volume, Brian Street, when it comes to literacy research. Street’s Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984) is a founding statement of the “new literacy studies” movement- a book which, perhaps more than any other, has been directly responsible for recent academic interest in literacy. In it, Street outlined a theory of literacy as social practice and social product. Whereas earlier writers had held that literacy automatically brought with it certain social and cognitive benefits, and that it was a precondition for the development of “modern” (read: based on a Western democratic model) societies, Street argued that literacy had no such necessary consequences. Instead, he showed that written language has served widely varying functions in different societies, although these functions typically involved, in one way or another, the exercise of power. The resulting “ideologi- cal” model of literacy has influenced most, if not all, subsequent formulations of the concept.

In his introductory chapter t o the present volume, Street

Requests for reprints may be sent to Dwight Atkinson, American Language Institute, University of Southern California, Los h g e l e s , California 90089- 1294.

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reprises and updates his earlier arguments. He goes on to stake out a unique territory for literacy studies a t the intersection of “sociolinguisticand anthropological theories. . . and. . . discourse and ethnographic method” (p. 3). Within these boundaries, he introduces the essays in the present volume--only one-third of which appear for the first t i m e a s representing “a state-of-the-art sample of the most promising current research in these areas, . . . a programmatic document of the new literacy studies” (p. 3).

Following Street’s introduction, the volume is organized into three parts. The first, “The incorporation of literacy into the communicative repertoire,” consists of ethnographic studies of written language use in four small-scale, non-Western societies. Each essay describes the unique and fully integrated role of writken language in the “lifeworlds” of these peoples, who range from the 100 or so inhabitants of the Papua-New Guinean village of Gapun t o the approximately 1.4 million Mende people of Sierra Leone. Besnier’s study of literacy on the tiny Pacific atoll of Nukulaelae, for example, richly details the way in which written languagein the form ofletter-writing-serves as a major conduit for the communication of intense personal feelings, a mode of expression by and large avoided in face-to-face interaction. The Nukulaelae communication of such feelings, in turn, is linked to the community’s economic and social needs and t o social practices that have evolved to meet them.

The second section, “Local literacies and national politics: Ethnicity, gender and religion,” features four essays taking some- what more macro-analytic approaches to literacy in social context. Three of them essays take much-needed histohcal perspectives on the development of literacy (or multiple literacies) in Somalia, southern Alaska, and the religious sphere ofwestern Nigeria. The remaining essay treats literacy among Hispanic irhmigrant women in Los Angeles, considering its potential for exploding traditional relations between the sexes in Latino-American society. The essays in this section are all broad-based enough t o be useful for languagditeracy planning purposes.

The third section, “Literacy variation in inban settings,”

Review by Atkinson 531

comprises four descriptions of written language use in urban communities in the U.S. and Britain. As in the first section, each of these studies is a relatively fine-grained ethnographic descrip- tion. The first two articles consider-the dynamic cultures of non-school literacy am&g high school and junior high school students of varying ethnic backgrounds in Philadelphia; the third describes vernacular and second-language Literacy practices among Hmong refugees, also in Philadelphia, that are crucial to their survival in the U.S. The final article considers the role of “media- tors of literacy”-individuals valued as consultants for their knowledge of English literacy practices-among the Moroccan immigrant population in London.

Conspicuous in its absence is any mention of language/ literacy acquisition. Descriptions of acquisition apparently are not within the purview of Street’s version of the “new literacy studies,” if this volume is in fact a “programmatic document” ofthe latter. Fortunately, other authors-and other volumes of essays- do not suffer under this limitation. Heath’s (1983) classic Ways with Words, the work of Gee (e.g., Gee, 19901, Schieffelin and Gilmore (19861, and, Cook-Gumperz (1986) are just a selection of recent work concerning how literacy practices are learned (or in some cases not learned) in various societies. An important contri- bution of this work to language acquisition research-although one frequently ignored or unrecognized-is the reconceptualization of language acquisition as language socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Watson-Gegeo, 1988). That is, because all language is socially organized and culturally embedded, a fruitful approach to the study of how users acquire a languagehteracy is to investigate how they are socialized to use that language, as well as how they are socialized through language use. Far less work has focused on socialization in second-language contexts, although recent work by Carson (19921, Poole (19921, and Watson-Gegeo (19881, among others, indicates the potential of this line of research.

A less serious criticism is that Str&et’s.volume lacks a summative statement by someone other than Street-an essay that not only recapitulates but also evaluates and concludes from

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a more or less distanced point of view. On the other hand, besides the useful intrcductory chapter, Street has written substantial introductions' t o the volume's three sections.

Finally; a number of the essays in this volume treat literacy use in multilingual situations. One can derive the more general point from this volume that literacy in social context is rarely, if ever, simply a matter of reading and writing. The existence in single communities of multiple literate languages is just one of a number of factors that complicates description. The very complex- ity of such situations, however, has turned literacy-or, as recent scholars like to conceptualize it, literacies, because no two cultur- ally embedded literacy practices are exactly a l ike in to a rich and dynamic field of research.

Dwight Atkinson Auburn University Received 10 June 1994

Note

'To name just a few of the most recent, Literacy:An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language by David Barton (Blackwell, 1994);Agendas for Second Language Literacy by Sandra McKay (Cambridge, 1993); Literacy, Culture and Development: Becoming Literate in Morocco by Daniel A. Wagner (Cambridge, 1993); Functional Literacy: Theoretical Issues and Educational implications edited by Ludo Verhoeven (Benjamins, 19941, Worlds ofLiteracy edited by Mary Hamilton, et al. (Multilingual Matters, 1993), Language and Literacy in Social Practice, edited by Janet Maybin (Multilingual Matters, 19941, Language, Literacy and Learning in Education Practice, edited by Barry Stierer and Janet Maybin (Multilingual Matters, 1994), Literacy and Language Analysis, edited by Robert Scholes (Erlbaum, 1993), Dioersity as Resource: Redefining Cultural Literacy, edited by Denise Murray (TESOL, 19921, and Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power, by M. A. K. Halliday and J.R. Martin (Pittsburgh, 1993).

References

Carson, J. G. (1992). Becoming biliterate: First language influences. Journal of Second Language Writing, I, 37-60.

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Cook-Gumperz, J. (Ed.). (1986). The social construction of literacy. Cam-

Gee, J. P. (1990). Social linguistics and literncies: Ideology in discourses.

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words:L.unguage, lifeand work incommunities

Poole, D. (1992). Language socialization in the second language classroom.

Schieffelin, B., & Gilmore, P. (Eds.). (1986).. The acquisition of literacy:

Schieffelin, B., & Ochs, E. (1986). Language socialization. Annual Review of

Watson-Gegeo, K. (1988). Ethnography in ESL: Defining the essentials.

bridge: Cambridge University Press.

London: Falmer.

and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Language Learning, 42, 593-616.

Ethnographic perspectives. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Anthropology, 15, 163-191.

TESOL Quarterly, 22, 575-592.