Abstract
This is the fourth edition of Social Linguistics and Literacies, which speaks well for both its authority and the ongoing engagement of its author with the advancement of a sociocultural approach to discourse analysis. As a reviewer, I approach it in its own terms as a statement made in 2012. The text comprises 10 chapters, organised as follows.
The first two chapters introduce key underlying concepts in discourse analysis, with Chapter 1 providing a brief history of ideology and its application to language and discourse, while Chapter 2 deals with meaning, which is not fixed but constructed and negotiated in specific social contexts.
The next three chapters deal with approaches to literacy and literacy development, with a particular focus on how they have historically been framed within the US education system. In Chapter 3, Gee provides an overview of approaches to literacy and education in this context from the 1960s to the 1990s. The recurrence of so-called literacy crises over this period result from what Gee suggests is the consideration of literacy as a mental attribute, and potential failing, of the individual, rather than an aspect of the dynamics of power in society.
Chapter 4 discusses the literacy myth, which is the belief that widespread literacy is associated with a more developed person and society, including economic and democratic advancement. Exploring both authoritarian and emancipatory motives for the promotion of literacy, Gee suggests there is little historical evidence to support such a belief. Authoritarian literacy development, for example through the reading of religious texts, develops literacy but not emancipation, since it promotes the acceptance of prescribed ideals, and literacy is merely a vehicle for authority or a tool for maintaining existing social hierarchies. Emancipatory literacy, following Freire (1970), promotes resistance to domination through knowledge and critical literacy, and is based on the premise that ‘Literacy only empowers people when it renders them active questioners of the social reality around them’ (p. 59). All literacy development, then, is positional, contains inherent social goals, and is politically and ideologically motivated.
In Chapter 5, Gee unpacks the primitive versus civilised distinction for language and society, giving a brief history of thoughts and writing on this matter from anthropology and sociology. He then moves on to an historical analysis of the literate/oral divide, building a case for a new approach, following the work of Vygotsky (1978) on the development, from literacy, of higher order cognitive skills such as abstract thought. Gee advances this by drawing on studies ranging from Scribner and Cole (1981), Scollon and Scollon (1981), Brice-Heath (1983) and Lareau (2003), which explore child-rearing and literacy practices in different homes. Lareau identifies two broad approaches – the cultivation model of parenting (associated with aspirational middle-class families) and the natural growth model (associated with poor or working-class families). Gee concludes that we should provide in schools the kind of mentoring relationship that the cultivation model of parenting provides in the home, so that children can achieve within the narrow determinism of the mainstream education system, which presupposes and rewards exactly the kinds of skills advanced in the cultivation model of parenting.
Chapters 6 and 7 deal with discourse analysis of both spoken and written texts, examining multiple ways, deriving from particular world views, of communicating in specific social contexts.
In Chapters 8 and 9, Gee explores how dynamics of power inherent in wider societal discourse practices impact on approaches to literacy in schools. While people whose primary discourse is that of the ruling class are advantaged in negotiating success in high stakes interactional domains such as job interviews, Gee claims that people who did not receive primary socialisation in such discourses of power must ‘make do’ by negotiating these interactional domains via their secondary discourses. Although Gee believes that primary discourses are learnt as part of the socialisation to knowledge and cannot be explicitly taught, he suggests a critical approach to literacy development, one that includes explicit reference to the discourses of power inherent in literacy practices and empowers students with the strategies needed to negotiate a meaningful place as both primary and secondary users of discourse.
In Chapter 10, Gee presents socially marginalised texts in ways that seek to normalize such discourses by showing the context in which they function as legitimate and meaningful communication. He locates the discourses within class- and race-based social divides, showing how they may disrupt dominant culture notions of acceptability in key social contexts, such as institutionalised education. Gee wants teachers to create education systems where learners can access opportunity by broadening their discourse repertoires, and he reminds us of our moral obligation to engage with such ideas.
This book provides a useful sociocultural lens through which to view discourse analysis and, as such, it continues to be an important reference for students and researchers new to the field from applied linguistics, education and communication studies. The question remains: What are readers from such disciplines looking for in the fourth edition of an important text? Given the time span between the first edition of Social Linguistics and Literacies in 1990 and the current edition, we might expect to see the inclusion of new literacies and data from relevant recent studies. While there is limited mention of digital media literacy, in Chapter 5, the majority of theory and data references are to work from the 1970s and 1980s. I acknowledge that landmark studies from this era (e.g. Brice-Heath, 1983) are important inclusions; however, since there are already three existing editions of the text, I would also have liked to see, in this fourth updating, greater reference to more recent studies.
We might also expect to see the analysis updated to reflect ways in which the discipline has evolved since the work was initiated. Accordingly, while I support the broader themes and purpose of the book, such as Gee’s call for social justice in education, in particular through the inclusion of multiple discourses, I am uncomfortable with some of the details, throughout the book, involving the lexical positioning of research participants and societal groups. For example, in Chapter 2, the author refers to Patricia Williams as ‘the African-American activist and lawyer’ (p. 21), but it is not clear what her race has to do with the discussion, which left me wondering why it was being forefronted. Elsewhere, the use of terms such as ‘upper class’ and ‘elite’ (Chapters 3 and 7) to describe more socially and economically advantaged members of society, and referring to others by their race perpetuates the very racial and socioeconomic caste system the author is trying to overturn. In addition, I felt that returning again and again to stereotyping views of ‘orality’ with being African American, and ‘literacy’ with being white and/or ‘upper class’ (Chapters 8 and 10), sounded somewhat dated and unnecessarily limiting.
This fourth edition of Social Linguistics and Literacies will certainly serve as an introduction for the readership of students and researchers at which it is aimed. They may, however, wish to keep in mind the possibility that a groundbreaking text extended from the past into the present will not always provide the same picture as a contemporary text constructed according to current perspectives and sensibilities.