Literacy and Culture (Chapter 6)

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Chapter 6 talks about extended meanings and applications of literacy --- from traditional print to computer technology. In the 21st century, it is important for teachers to help students learn about all the symbol systems, the necessary cognitive strategies to interpret the message, and the larger patterns to structure messages in diverse symbolic systems. However, the close relationship between literacy and culture is often neglected in educational settings. In such a global village like the U.S., at school there are people from different cultural backgrounds. Their diverse backgrounds influence how they approach the literacy. For example, African-American children often use a “topic associating” style when narrating while white children use “topic-centered” style. Therefore AAVE students are usually misunderstood and evaluated negatively since their literacy performances do not conform to those of dominant groups.

The same case also happens to foreign language learning. In English writing, it is writer-responsible while in East Asian countries, it is reader-responsible. For instance, instead of introducing the statement of purpose initially, Chinese learners prefer to dance around the topic and gradually turn to the main point. When they transfer from L1 to L2, their English writing is labeled as unclear and unorganized by native speakers of English who think writers should take responsibility to clarify the theme.

As a result, when teaching students of different culture backgrounds or ESL/EFL learners, educators should keep in mind how culture influences literacy learning. In spite of the same symbol systems they have to learn, these cultural minority groups have different ways of encoding and decoding messages and different discourse forms, which may result in their difficulties with literacy learning in the countries of dominant groups. It is also a challenge for teachers to teach literacy of a variety of symbols in the increasingly diverse classrooms.