Ways of Knowing Journal 3, 2002. pp. 54 – 62.
SITUATING LITERACY WITHIN A THEORY OF
DISCOURSE: creating imaginary letters.
Kathy Pitt. Lancaster University.
Abstract
In this paper I give a brief outline of Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s theory
of the role of language within and between social practice and Bernstein’s
theory of recontextualisation, and then go on to situate literacy within
the moment of discourse and explain how literacy will vary according to
social practice. I illustrate how critical discourse analysis can illuminate
this variation by analysing three events involving letter writing; two of
which take place in educational practices. This analysis shows how letter
writing can be transformed into an imaginary act in the classroom.
Introduction.
In this paper I will briefly outline one theorisation of the role of
language within social practice, and situate the use of the written
1
language within this perspective of action and interaction in contemporary
life. I will then illustrate how this theory can contribute towards
understandings of the meanings and uses of literacy - or literacies - with
data from my critical discourse analysis of the pedagogic discourse of
family literacy (Pitt, 2001). The concept of practice, especially within the
notion of literacy practice, is fundamental to contemporary literacy
studies (for example, Barton, 1994, Baynham, 1995, Heath, 1983,
Scribner and Cole, 1981, Street, 1984) and detailed studies of the uses of
literacy in diverse social practices have provided rich accounts of the
situated nature of reading and writing (for example, Barton and
Hamilton,1998, Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic,2000, Gee et al, 1996, Heath,
1983, Street, 1984, 1993). Yet, as Street points out, there is no uniform
agreement over the use of the term literacy practices in the field
(Street, 1993:13), and in my reading of the literature I have found that
the term social practice is used in a variety of ways. Literacy practice
and social practice are sometimes used interchangeably, whereas, in this
paper I set out a theoretical framework in which the uses of the written
language are seen as one part of the wider concept of social practice.
I contrast the act of writing letters in adult education classrooms
to an account of one written for the workplace in order to show how
writing a letter differs according to the practice this action is part of,
2
and I analyse these differences in terms of social relations, power and
emotion. Such an analytical approach to language and literacy offers an
understanding of how language choice relates to other aspects of the
social and can, I believe, help educators and their students become more
reflexive about educational practice.
First I sketch the main concepts of critical discourse analysis.
Then I describe the pedagogy of family literacy which has provided the
two examples of literacy events within an educational practice I discuss
here. I then analyse these two events within the theoretical framework
I have set out and compare them with an account of the writing of a
letter of reference by a retired fireman.
Social practice and discourse.
This theory of language within social practice has been built up by
Norman Fairclough (for instance Discourse and Social Change 1992) and
extended with collaboration with Lilie Chouliaraki in Discourse in Late
Modernity in 1999. For them the concept of social practice or process is
at a relatively high level of abstraction. Here is one definition they
offer:
By practices we mean habitualised ways, tied to particular times
and places, in which people apply resources (material or symbolic)
to act together in the world. (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 21).
3
In order to “ground” this abstract description I will give two
hypothetical but concrete examples of social practice as defined above.
For instance: when we see a woman organising the activities of twenty to
thirty seven year old children in a specific kind of room, at specific times
of the day and year and in certain countries, then we can call this event a
junior primary school class and link it to other similar actions and
participants in other similar buildings. All such events, and whole sets of
related events, belong to the social practice of primary school education,
and accordingly the participants can be labelled as teachers, pupils,
parents, school governors etceteras. The same woman may be seen at a
different time of the day sitting in a room in a pub talking with another
group of adults around a table with papers on it. The action here differs
from the first one, and the role and behaviour of the woman will differ
too. This event is part of a different social practice, perhaps that of a
local campaigning group, and the labelling, action and social identities of
the participants differ from the first example too.
In both these examples language is a primary symbolic resource but
is being used for different purposes. And even within one specific time
and place where individuals are acting together - such as a classroom the purposes of this action may well be diverse rather than shared.
4
However, the event will be recognisable to an onlooker because of
identifiable patterns of behaviour and space. Such “readings” of these
events depend, though, on the cultural knowledge of the viewer.
Members of the Lancaster Literacy Research Group, for example, set out
to take photographs of activities involving literacy in countries unfamiliar
to them, and they found that they often needed local people to explain
the meaning of what they had photographed (Lancaster Literacy Research
Group, 1993).
In order to understand the relations both within and between
social practices Fairclough and Chouliaraki make use of an analytical
framework conceived by David Harvey, (although Harvey, in fact, does not
use the term social practice, instead referring to the social process as a
way of highlighting the idea of flow and relations between actions and
elements). Harvey breaks the social process into six analytic groupings
which he calls moments. Here is how he represents them:
Discourse/language
Power
Beliefs/values/desires
Social relations
Institutions/rituals
Material practices
“Moments” in a Cognitive Map of the Social Process. (Harvey 1996:78).
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There is disagreement from Chouliaraki and Fairclough over the number
and naming of these classifications (for example they question his use of
the term practices in material practices, which, they argue, privileges
material activity over the other moments - Chouliaraki and Fairclough,
1999: 28,29). And I certainly have found some of them to be rather
large and unwieldy - for example, the moment of beliefs, desires and
values, which Harvey also calls the imaginary brings together what you
feel with what you imagine and what you believe. Each one of these
experiential areas I think needs its own space or moment in an analysis.
Nevertheless, whichever way you define or group these elements,
what has proved fruitful for theorising the role of language in the social
is Harvey’s emphasis on the relations between the different moments or
elements of any social practice, and particularly the role of the moment
of discourse/semiotics within these relations. He talks about each
moment having an internal relation to the others within the flow of human
life and activity. If, for example, discourse is seen to be “mere words” (and I think here of some of the criticisms of the first New Labour
government in the UK) then there is an absence of internalisation
between discourse and material action; a gap between how people act and
how they discursively represent their actions.
6
The moment of discourse
Both Harvey and Chouliaraki and Fairclough single out the moment of
discourse/language (which Chouliaraki and Fairclough extend to other
semiotic systems such as visual representations) as being distinctive in its
relations with the other moments and of great social importance. As
Harvey puts it:
Discourses internalize in some sense everything that occurs at
other moments (-------) discursive effects suffuse and saturate all
other moments within the social process. (Harvey, 1996:80).
And it is this aspect of a theory of the social that has been elaborated by
Fairclough and Chouliaraki and Fairclough in what is known as critical
discourse analysis.
The moment of discourse /semiosis includes the use of semiosis to
both represent and reflect on action within social practice (that is discourse) and its use as action or part of action (that is- genre). We not
only act, but we also reflect on our actions and represent them in talk and
images and in designed texts. These representations are shaped by the
particular combination of moments of local action or event, and texts
such as reports, videos, books,- produced to represent or reflect on
practices -disembed that action from the local and influence other
actions both within and across social practices. Hence the importance of
7
literacies- which are integral to such processes. The moment of
discourse, therefore, is a key channel between activities within a
practice, thus contributing towards habitualised ways of acting.
Social practices are not, however, impermeable, isolated entities.
They exist in networks of practices and particular practices also shape
and are shaped by their relations with other practices. Within each field
or network of practices we can, according to Fairclough, identify an order
of discourse - a specific set of discourses and genres that are available
to be drawn upon and articulated together within any particular event or
action. When change takes place in habitualised ways of acting, it is
through shifts in how genres and discourses are articulated together
within and across practices. If we take the social practice of further
education in the UK, for example, in the last decades of the twentieth
century genres and discourses from the practice of commerce have been
moved into and articulated alongside existing genres and discourses,
resulting in change that affects all the other elements of this educational
practice.
Recontextualisation
To understand such change Chouliaraki and Fairclough have drawn
upon Basil Bernstein’s description of the properties of pedagogic practice
(1996). He argues that the educational goal to communicate knowledge,
8
which is formed in a different social practice, entails the movement of
this knowledge (discourse), with its distinctive internalised moments from
one practice to another. Through this movement the discourse is
transformed as it is relocated. Bernstein called this the
recontextualising principle of pedagogic discourse. This transformational
process, Chouliaraki and Fairclough point out, is not restricted to
educational practices, but is also part of mass media practices
(Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999:110).
The moment of discourse, therefore, can also be a transforming
medium within and across practices, and literacy is a part of this process
as I go on to discuss.
Literacy and discourse
It follows on from this theoretical perspective that the use of the
written language, most often nominalised as literacy, is part of the
moment of discourse alongside the spoken language and non-linguistic
modes of communication such as visual images, symbols, colour and text
layout (see Cope and Kalantzis, 1999 and Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996 for
explorations of the multi-modality of contemporary texts). Writing,
designing, reading and speaking are all part of the social action of a
practice and its representation and so they are steeped in the other
moments; the social relations, feelings and material processes of that
9
practice. Literacy, therefore, will vary according to the social practice,
and this variety is captured by the use of the plural - literacies- by many
New Literacy Studies researchers (for example Barton, 1994, Barton,
Hamilton and Ivanic, 2000, Baynham, 1995 Street, 1993). It is also an
influential part of the discourse moment as the writing element results in
texts through which discourses and genres may transcend time and place.
Within educational social practice the constitution of literacy is
more complex as learning to use the written language in other social
practices is one of the main purposes of the social action. Knowledge
about literacy is relocated within the social relations and action of
institutionalised sites of education. I will now use this theoretical
framework to show one example of how the use of literacy in the form of
letter writing is shaped by the social practice it is situated in. See
Barton and Hall (2000) for a wide range of explorations of letter writing.
The pedagogy of family literacy
The literacy pedagogy named family literacy is an interesting case
as its introduction by the Basic Skills Agency (BSA) in England and Wales
has entailed the bringing together of participants from two distinct
educational practices: early years educators from nursery and primary
schools and basic skills tutors from adult literacy programmes. It has
also brought mothers and children together as students within the same
10
educational programmei. New genres and discourses are therefore
created out of these relocations.
Family Literacy education revolves around a core idea; adults
responsible for the care of children in the home coming together to
discuss with educators how children learn to become literate at home and
school, and what the carer’s role in this process is. But there exist a wide
variety of approaches to the application of this idea. In the USA family
literacy has been shaped by the complex mix of ethnicities and cultures
that make up the American population and the diversity of culture and
practice has led to arguments against the standardisation of models. The
book Many Families, Many Literacies (Taylor, 1997) provides an overview
of this argument for plurality. In addition, Auerbach (1997) identifies
three different approaches to family literacy which she calls intervention
– prevention, multiple literacies and social change. An example of the
social change approach is the Connect programme in Scotland (Tett and
St. Clair 1997).
The model which I am concerned with here is a centralised one and
falls under Auerbach’s category of intervention – prevention. It focuses
not only on the literacy of the child but also insists that the programme
should include work on the carer’s literacy. This is the model of family
literacy that is promoted by the BSA (known as ALBSU in 1993 when it
11
introduced family literacy to England and Wales, having won government
backing to do so) The aim of this model is to intervene in family practices
in order to increase the child’s chances of learning successfully at school
and to help the adult towards further education and employment. So the
use of the written language within the social practice of parenting
becomes the subject matter of an institutional educational practice.
My analysis of this pedagogy comes from a set of teacher training
videos called Developing Family Literacy, made by the BSA and screened
by BBC select in February 1995. They are four thirty minute television
programmes made up of edited interviews with parents, teachers,
headteachers and other educational experts involved in the pilot family
literacy programmes set up by the BSA. These participants talk about
their action in this practice and this talk is interspersed with film
footage.
I chose these texts as they are very detailed representations of
the BSA’s ideal model of this new pedagogy, and are specifically designed
to shape the future actions of the teacher audience. Yet, they are also
constructed from actual events that make up this practice. Much of the
visual track is film of classrooms in which family literacy education is
taking place, and the houses and streets that surround these classrooms.
What has been selected from on-going practice, and the juxtaposition of
12
film of actual events with a scripted voiceover is part of my overall
analysis (see Pitt, 2001, 2002)
In the BSA model of family literacy the literacy programme is
divided into three strands: early years teachers work with the children,
basic skills teachers work with the parents, and there is a joint session
when all participants come together and the parents and children share
an activity that has often been the topic of the adult strand. Thus, the
adult strand is used both to inform parents about early child literacy
learning (often called emergent literacy), and to develop the parents’ own
use of literacy. In the teacher training videos most of the film of
parents participating in literacy events shows them learning about
emergent literacy or making literacy artefacts for their children. These
actions are constructed as relevant to the parents’ own literacy, as the
following extract from the voiceover in the first programme illustrates,
“we concentrate on two topics which are central to the joint sessions and
show how parents develop their skills alongside.”.
One of the uses of the written language represented in this strand
is the writing of formal letters; a genre that is used in a wide variety of
social practices and so interesting to examine. In the next section I
analyse the transformation of this discursive act as it is brought into
contact with the other moments of the practice of family literacy.
13
Agony aunts and Disney characters: writing letters in the classroom.
In these texts parents participating in two different family
literacy courses are filmed reading and writing letters. The motivation
for focusing on this particular use of literacy is described by one of the
teachers as coming from the parents, rather than the teachers: 'Every
student that I've worked with so far has requested letter writing'.
However, the teachers filmed in these texts get the parents to write
letters that would seem to bear little relation to letters that most adults
may have to write. One set of parents is asked to write a letter to their
children in the next classroom assuming another persona, as this
instruction from a basic skills tutor showsii:
So what I'd like us to do today and to think about doing today is to
write a letter to each of our children next door, in the early years
room, pretending that you are a favourite character, toy, television
personality of theirs. So you'll be writing a letter as if it was from
them..
Later in the text one or two parents are seen reading their letter to a
child seated next to them.
In the other activity teacher and parents are filmed reading,
discussing and replying to two typed letters, called by the voiceover
agony aunt letters . These letters are said to be from parents asking for
14
advice about their young children's reading, and the classroom task is
shown to be part of a session with the parents about early reading. Here
is the beginning of one of the agony aunt letters which is read out by one
of the parents:
Dear Liz. In the evening there is never enough time to hear my son
read. By the time they have watched their programmes, had their
tea and the younger ones are in bed he is too tired and cannot
concentrate.
The letters have obviously been written by the teacher, rather
than taken from a real text, as the content of both matches the concerns
of the session on early reading exactly, which is unlikely to be the case
with letters actually published, and the letters, as shown on screen, are in
a work sheet format, rather than having been photocopied from a
magazine or newspaper page. The parents are then asked to reply to
these letters in the role of the agony aunt and are filmed doing this while
the teacher explains to camera how the letter activity links two
pedagogic aims:
The session that we did was about early reading and there were
two purposes of it mainly. The first one was to make the parents
more aware of the sorts of things they could do to encourage their
children to develop these early reading skills. And the second
15
theme of the morning was to get them to develop their own skills
as well.
The agony aunt letters were introduced to both consolidate learning
about early reading and provide an activity in which the parents could
actually engage with the written language in a genre deemed to be useful.
So the creation of these imaginary letters has resulted from the
pedagogic need to bring together the transmission of knowledge about
early literacy with adult engagement with literacy.
Furthermore, behind these tasks is a view of letter writing as a set
of abstract principles that can apply to any letter designated as formal.
The teacher of the first activity indicates that these principles have
already been transmitted: 'You'll be writing a formal letter as we've
already discussed formal letters. So the layout would be as we've already
talked through, and a teacher involved in the second activity speaks the
following to camera whilst on the screen we see two mothers engaged in
writing a reply to one of the agony aunt letters:
Their writing improves because they know specifically what they
need to work on. So they work on their spellings and they work on
their punctuation and they work on the layout of things as they go
along.
16
This division of the knowledge of how to write letters from letters that
participants actually have to write, and their varying contexts, is part of
a discourse of reading and writing as a set of decontextualised skills to
be transmitted, which is prevalent in educational practices and arises
from such practice needs to instruct and evaluate. These parents write
to develop their skills, here listed as layout, spelling and punctuation, and
consolidate their knowledge. These are school purposes for writing which
create a specific form of literacy. The widespread nature of this form of
literacy is illustrated by Cathy Kell’s discussion of the teaching of letter
writing in adult literacy classes in South Africa (Kell, 2000). In her study
the students were being taught how to write personal letters, rather
than formal ones, but Kell shows how such letters are taught as being
made up of a series of fixed standardised elements.
This writing also provides material for assessment, as a teacher
explains when discussing accreditation:
At the beginning of every session when we outline what the aims
for that session are, the lists of activities that go up on the board
also have next to them the numbers that tie into Wordpower. So
parents know that 'when I've written this letter, I can tick off
nine point one because I've written a letter and that's part of my
Wordpower assessment
17
Writing a letter, according to this representation, is not one part of a
communication process, but a necessary step to gain a certificate which
may confer some socio-economic power on the holder.
Likewise, in Kell’s study of letter writing in South African adult
classrooms (2000), she shows how the school practices differ widely from
the actual letter-writing that was taking place within the communities of
the adult students. However, knowing how to write the school version of
personal letters is considered as cultural capital by both students and
teachers.
The interaction around the writing and reading of the letters is
also shaped by the moment of social relations it is situated in. In all the
events I have discussed above, the activity has been initiated by the
teacher: for example teachers say or write, So what I'd like us to do
today,--- Choose a letter and imagine you are the agony aunt,-- make a
leaflet etc. Teachers' instructing parents to read or write specific texts
can be found throughout these videos, and are the social relations that
are considered the norm within the hierarchical social practice of the
school where teachers normally work with children and teenagers rather
than adults.
In the BSA model of family literacy, as represented in these
videos, the parent’s literacy activities are most frequently imposed by the
18
teachers and used to instruct and evaluate. Writing a letter on a family
literacy course, therefore, internalises specific social relations, feelings
and values. One mother participating on one of these courses describes
her feelings about an act of writing very vividly:
We done a writing piece on memories, and I done three pages full,
and I was so proud of it and I couldn’t wait to hand it in, like a
school kid would with the homework.
Although this parent was not talking about letter writing, which is my
focus here, this description of involvement in a literacy activity shows one
individual taking up a discourse which sets up the teacher as agent and
the parents as compliant readers and writers of imposed texts; for this
mother the teacher initiates, inspires and is the audience: using the
written language is strongly identified with school practice.
Harry writes a reference letter.
To provide a contrast I would like to give an example of letter
writing from an ethnographic study of every day literacy in one
community (Barton and Hamilton, 1998). In their study Barton and
Hamilton interview a retired officer in the Fire Brigade, Harry, who left
school at the age of fourteen. He tells the researcher about a reference
19
letter he wrote for someone who used to work under him in the Fire
Brigade. This is some of what Harry said about it:
I gave one lad a reference. He was a fireman and he wanted a job.
And he came round to see me ‘cos I used to be his Officer and
asked for a reference. And I give him one you see. And my lad
came round . . . I always take a copy. And my lad came round, who’s
well educated and he started laughing at it. I said, “What’s to
do?”. He said, “That’s no good.” He said, “You don’t do things like
that.” And he wrote a proper one out you see. So that I got in my
car right away and I took it round to this fellow and I said, “Give
me back that one and have this.”
It was rambling, you see. Instead of getting down to nitty gritty.
Oh no, I didn’t feel bad about it. No, because what did they expect
of me anyway? Well I said, I wrote down what I felt about him and
it was all true. So what more do they want. And yet, my lad
laughed at it. Well, I read his and he actually said as much in a few
words you see. That’s what annoyed me. I wish I could do that.
(Barton and Hamilton 1998:82).
In this account of a specific literacy event there are similarities to the
family literacy pedagogic practice of letter writing: the writing task is
20
imposed; it is a request from an ex-colleague, it is a “formal” letter and
the writer gives the letter to someone else to evaluate it. Although the
letter writing is done in the home it crosses domains into the workplace.
However, the internalisation of power and social relations between
father and adult son, and retired fire officer and younger subordinate
fireman are not the same as teacher and student and mother and young
child, nor is the value attached to the act of writing. Harry appears to
experience a complex mix of emotions over his literacy here; being valued
by the request to act as referee, but frustrated by his son’s assessment
of his version, and his son’s ability to be concise. Note here, too, that his
problems with the writing do not appear to be connected with layout,
spelling or punctuation, all highlighted by teachers in the family literacy
texts; but with the much more nebulous problem of generic conventions.
This example shows that the educational social practice is not unique in
constituting letter writing as imposed and carrying complex power
relations, but that the experience of using the written language varies
according to the specific internalisation of moments within particular
social practices.
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Conclusion
In the family literacy programmes selected for the BSA teacher training
videos the specific pedagogic needs of the teachers leads to the creation
of imaginary letter - writing tasks and the representation of literacy as a
set of decontextualised skills, the performance of which can lead to the
gaining of qualifications. How the mothers on these courses experience
their engagement with the written language is shaped by the social
practice they are participating in and the roles they are given within it.
The implicit hierarchical social relations of the classrooms are
internalised within these literacy events. Mothers become agony aunts
and Disney characters and what they learn about literacy here seems
very different from Harry’s experiences of imposed letter writing. The
reading and writing of advice letters and letters from parent to child are
recontextualised within a practice that aims to instruct and evaluate.
Such an analysis supports the conceptualisation of “literacies”
rather than one single “Literacy” that is detached from the social
process. It also supports Bernstein’s argument that the pedagogic
principle transforms knowledge into an imaginary discourse and creates an
imaginary subject. This happens through the movement of this knowledge
from one practice and set of moments, to another as he explains::
22
When a discourse moves through recontextualizing, from an
original site to a pedagogic site, the original discourse is
abstracted from its social base, position and power relations.
(Bernstein, 1996:53).
Literacy, being part of the discourse moment, thus becomes imaginary
too, as the family literacy letters show.
References.
ALBSU. (1995). Developing Family Literacy. TV Programmes for teachers.
Barton, D. (1994). Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written
Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Auerbach, E. (1997). Reading between the Lines in Taylor, D. (ed.). Many
Families, Many Literacies: An international declaration of principles.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann.
Barton, D. and Hall, N. (eds.) (2000) Letter Writing as a Social Practice.
Amsterdam, John Benjamins B.V.
Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (1998). Local Literacies: reading and writing in
one community. London, Routledge.
Barton, D, Hamilton, M. and Ivanic, R. (eds.) (2000). Situated Literacies:
Reading and Writing in Context.London: Routledge.
Baynham, M. (1995) Literacy Practices: Investigating Literacy in Social
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Bernstein, B. (1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory,
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Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M.(eds.) (1999) MultiLiteracies: Literacy Learning
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Gee, J.P., Hull, G. & Lankshear, C. (1996). The New Work Order: behind
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Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.
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Heath, S. (1983). Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in
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Kell, C. (2000) “Teaching letters: The Recontextualisation of LetterWriting Practices in Literacy Classes for Unschooled Adults in South
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Lancaster Literacy Research Group (1993) “Photographing Literacy
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Pitt, K. (2001) The Discourse of Family Literacy unpublished PhD thesis.
Lancaster University.
Pitt, K. (2002). “Being a New Capitalist Mother” in Discourse and Society
13 (2) pp. 251 - 267.
Scribner, S. and Cole, M. (1981) The Psychology of Literacy Cambridge,
MA. Harvard University Press.
Street, B. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice.Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Street, B. (1993).. (ed) Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, D. (1997). Many Families, Many Literacies: An international
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Tett, L. & St Clair, R. (1997) “Family literacy in the educational
marketplace: a cultural perspective” in International Journal of LifeLong
Education, 16, 2. 109 - 120.
i
Although in the UK fathers are encouraged to join in these programmes, it is mainly the mothers who
participate, an issue I discuss elsewhere (Pitt, 2002).
ii
In a workshop for educators in which I talked about this classroom event one of the educators told the
group that she had actually written letters to her daughter as if they had been written by her daughter’s
favourite teddy bear, so this kind of letter writing does exist in some parenting practices. However, the
educator was able to affirm that her literacy act was internalised with a different set of moments than
that shown on the video. She had certainly not written the letter for evaluation purposes.
24