Talk about Text: Where Literacy is Learned and Taught

ABSTRACT

To be literate, the author proposes, is to have the disposition, as composer or interpreter, to engage with a text in one or more different modes according to the type of text involved and one's purpose in using it. Five modes of engagement are distinguished: performative, functional, informational, re-creational, and epistemic. However, only the epistemic mode, it is argued—in which meaning is treated as tentative, provisional, and open to alternative interpretations and to revision—fully exploits the potential of literacy to empower the thinking of those who use it.

The bulk of the article then considers the learning and teaching of literacy in terms of an apprenticeship model, which is based on Vygotskian notions of assisted performance in joint activity. However, because the activities that are central to literate practices are mental rather than physical—and are therefore unobservable—an essential part of such assisted performance is enacting the mental processes involved through talking about the text. Examples of literacy events in homes and classrooms are then presented to show how, through talk about texts of various kinds, children are inducted into ways of engaging with texts that are appropriate to the occasion.

Finally, it is argued that, if children are to have appropriate literacy learning experiences, there will need to be radical changes in the ways in which most teachers think about the place of texts in their classroom programs and about their own role in helping children to engage with them appropriately. They will, in fact, need to become literate learners in their own classrooms. One way in which this can happen is then described. Teachers were encouraged to engage in a collaborative inquiry that involved making video recordings in their own classrooms. These then became texts of classroom practice, with which they could engage epistemically, as they discussed them with researchers in order to plan and evaluate revisions in the provision of learning opportunities for their students.