New Literacy Studies

New Literacy Studies (NLS) refers to an approach to literacy and literacy education underpinned by three central ideas. First, literacy is seen as a communicative tool, with the emphasis firmly placed on its intersubjective aspects. In other words, the starting point for analysis is the way humans use texts to symbolize and transmit information to each other. Second, literacy develops to meet social needs, and this is true for literacy across societies and for individuals. When there is a task for which text use is necessary or desirable, then literacy strategies will develop. Third, and arising from these first two points, it may make more sense to talk about multiple “literacies” than a singular “literacy.” Taken together, these ideas have significant implications for the teaching of reading and writing and have been summarized as a “social practices” view of literacy. There are strong indications that the insights of the NLS have gone far beyond the immediate field of literacy teaching and learning.

The NLS developed during the “social turn” of the behavioral sciences in the 1980s and, in common with other developments of that era, features strong cultural relativism. There is resistance to the notion that any particular form of literacy is inherently more effective or valuable than any others. Any literacy practice is valuable to the extent that it is appropriate for its social context. The question of whether an approach to text is right or wrong [Page 609]depends on its adherence to the set of norms within which it operates, and the notion of a standard orthography is undermined. To make this idea more concrete, consider a note on a fridge door that says “M. Sal etc.” This note exists within a specific social practice of literacy and communicates quite clearly to those engaged in that social practice; to them, the note means something like “Michael, remember to pick up salad vegetables and fruit when you pass the market on your way home from work.” This use of text is highly localized, but that does not make it less valuable, or less useful in literacy learning as a manifestation of textual production activities.

The NLS emerged in opposition to two central tenets of the approach to literacy dominant until the 1980s—what Brian Street referred to as the “autonomous” model of literacy. First, within the autonomous model, literacy was considered a set of individual cognitive skills, with reading typically broken down into lexical access and comprehension. More fluent readers were considered to have stronger skills, with implicit acceptance of the notion that there was a single continuum of skills involved in reading. Second, this model viewed literacy as an independent variable that brings about a series of effects such as cognitive development, economic development, and social progress. In this view, societies evolved from oral to literate stages, with the development of literacy having a profound effect on the society in supporting logical thought, extended territorial holdings, and the development of commerce.

NLS challenged this model and instead argued for what Street called an “ideological” model of literacy, which held that literacy practices are never just neutral skills, but are always embedded in social and cultural contexts. More than this, literacy practices are implicated in struggles over power, resources, and meanings. NLS scholars are skeptical of the idea that literacy changes people or societies, believing instead that literacy practices are essentially reactive, created and shaped within specific sets of human relationships.

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