Elsa Auerbach

Literacy and Ideology

The past decade has seen increasing acceptance of the perspective that there can be no disinterested, objective, and value-free definition of literacy: The way literacy is viewed and taught is always and inevitably ideological. All theories of literacy and all literacy pedagogies are framed in systems of values and beliefs which imply particular views of the social order and use literacy to position people socially. Even those views which paint literacy as a neutral, objectively definable set of skills are in fact rooted in a particular ideological perspective, and it is precisely because they obscure this orientation that they are most insidious. In fact, as Fairclough (1989) argues, one of the primary mechanisms of social control is the “naturalization” of institutional practices which legitimize and perpetuate existing power relations.

LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND POWER IN SCHOOLING

LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND POWER IN SCHOOLING. Teresa L. McCarty (Ed.) . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xxvi + 317.

Reexamining English Only in the ESL Classroom

34.50 paper. The ways in which macro factors of global socioeconomic power shape micro language/literacy interactions in education have increasingly gained attention in applied linguistics research. This volume, which emerged from an American Anthropological Association symposium in 1999, sets out to examine this dialectic through the lens of critical ethnographic research. In her introduction, McCarty draws on the new literacy studies paradigm to challenge dichotomizing discourses—oral versus literate, literate versus illiterate, monolingual versus bilingual—as well as current calls for standardization, homogeneity, and universalist approaches to language and literacy education. Instead, the editor situates the volume within a social practices framework, which emphasizes the multiplicity and variability of literacy practices shaped by context, power, culture, and purpose.