Reading and Literacy Foreign Language Pedagogy EA 125/225

What do you read? What types/kinds of things do you read in daily life? What is “text”?

Why do you read something? Purpose of reading Is reading a “passive” act?

What is “reading”? From a sociological perspective, reading and writing are communication acts in which readers and writers position one another in particular ways, drawing on conventions and resources provided by the culture. Texts do not arise directly and naturally from thought, but develop out of an interaction between writer and reader (even when writer and reader are one and the same person.) (Kern, 1993, p. 34)

What is “literacy”? What does “literacy rate” mean? What does “literacy” mean in the words such as “computer literacy,” “religious literacy,” “cultural literacy” etc.?

Literacy Literacy involves not only the ability to produce and interpret texts, but also a critical awareness of the relationships between texts, discourse conventions, and social and cultural contexts. (Kern, 1993, p. 6) Literacy is neither natural, nor universal, nor ideologically neutral, but culturally constructed. It is precisely because literacy is variable and intimately tied to the sociocultural practices of language use in a given society that it is of central importance in our teaching of language and cutlure. (Kern, 1993, p. 23)

Vygotsky Literacy (and indeed cognition in general) is not the personal, idisyncratic property of an individual, but rather a phenomenon created by society and shared and changed by the member of that society. (Kern, 1993, p. 35)

Sociocultural View of Literacy Literacy involves… 1. Interpretation 2. Collaboration 3. Conventions 4. Cultural knowledge 5. Problem solving 6. Reflection and self-reflection 7. Language use (Kern, 1993, pp )