Culture and Literacy

Literacy always occurs in a social context, which means that culture has a profound impact on literacy and the way it is learned and practiced. Literacy is best viewed not as a constant but as a particular set of activities, carried out in particular cultural settings for particular purposes. It is a cultural practice that takes different forms among different groups of people at various times and places.

To become literate, and to be viewed as proficient in literacy by insiders to a culture, an individual must go beyond learning a set of skills, such as those needed to decode words. In addition, the individual must learn an entire discourse, which includes the cultural knowledge required to use [Page 577]literacy appropriately in a range of settings. In keeping with the idea that literacy is not a single set of practices, some scholars use the terms multiple literacies or multi-literacies.

Multiple literacies, or variations in the forms and uses of literacy in different communities, have been documented in ethnographic studies conducted in a wide range of locations. Shirley Brice Heath conducted a landmark study focusing on two communities in the Piedmont area of North and South Carolina: Roadville, a White working-class community, and Trackton, a Black working-class community. Definite similarities were identified: Adults in both communities used reading and writing for practical purposes such as creating shopping lists, leaving messages, and engaging in financial transactions, but did not tend to interact with prose in a sustained manner, for example, as required for reading a novel. One difference was that Roadville residents generally regarded reading as an individual activity based on the idea that the text should be understood at a literal level. Trackton residents tended to reword written texts into an oral mode so that the text could be readily discussed and interpreted by others.

Heath's observations showed that schools were organized to fit the cultural backgrounds of Roadville children more closely than the cultural backgrounds of Trackton children. For example, Roadville children were accustomed to responding to questions to which the teacher already knew the answer (e.g., “Who is the main character in this story?”). In contrast, Trackton children learned to respond to open-ended questions, such as those asking how one thing resembled another, but not to known-answer questions.

Viewing literacy as a cultural practice has important implications for education, especially the schooling of students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, such as the students studied by Heath. In educational contexts, key elements of diversity include student ethnicity, social class, and primary language. In the United States, mainstream students are generally those who are White, from middle-class families, and native speakers of English. Considerable evidence suggests that schools are generally less successful at promoting the literacy learning of students of diverse backgrounds than that of their mainstream peers. The phrase literacy achievement gap refers to the fact that large-scale tests of reading achievement typically show that students of mainstream backgrounds are performing at higher levels than students of diverse backgrounds. According to results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a large-scale U.S. testing program, students of diverse backgrounds as a group have fallen approximately 4 years behind their peers by Grade 12.

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