Roz Ivanič

I Is for Interpersonal: Discoursal Construction of Writer Identities and the Teaching of Writing.

In this article I explain what I mean by discoursal construction of writer identities and give an example of the way in which one 26-year-old student writer is positioned by the discourse choices in an academic essay she wrote. I then place discoursal construction of writer identity within the framework proposed by Goffman (1959,1981) for thinking about self-representation through any form of social action. I suggest that current approaches to the teaching of writing tend either to disregard writer identity or to focus on the self as “animator” or the self as “author” in Goffmans (1981) terms. Critical Language Awareness, however, focuses explicitly on the discoursal construction of writer identities. Finally, I propose directions for further research on the discoursal construction of writer identities and on how this issue can be addressed within the teaching of writing.

Improving Learning in College : Rethinking Literacies Across the Curriculum

Part 1: What Are The Issues? 1. Literacies as a resource for learning in college Part 2: What Does The Research Tell Us? 2. What students do with reading and writing in their everyday lives 3. Ways of understanding literacy practices 4. Literacies across the college curriculum 5. Comparisons across contexts: The textual mediation of learning on Childcare courses Part 3: What Are The Implications? 6. Making a difference: The conception, implementation and analysis of changes in practice 7. Recontextualizing the research: Bilingual literacies for learning in Wales 8. Conceptualizing the interface between everyday and curriculum literacy practices 9. Implications for learning in college and beyond

Worlds of Literacy

Preface - literary practices and literary events introduction signposts bringing together our worlds of literacy different voices - handling multiplicities of literacy consitituting identities choice and change collaboration and resistance - challenging words.

Critical Language Awareness Part I: A Critical Review of Three Current Approaches to Language Awareness.

Abstract. We assume that the development of a critical awareness of the world ought to be the main objective of all education, including language education. Language awareness programmes ought therefore to help children develop not only operational and descriptive knowledge of the linguistic practices of their world, but also a critical awareness of how these practices are shaped by, and shape, social relationships and relationships of power. In this, the first of a two‐part paper, we show that a range of existing language awareness proposals and materials are not ‘critical’ in this sense. On the contrary, with a few exceptions, they present the naturalised domain of linguistic practices as a natural domain, a given and common sense reality whose social origins are out of sight. This is true for bilingual, dialectal and diatypic variation. Most current approaches to language awareness present the domain of linguistic practices as a pluralistically harmonious domain; no attention is given to ideological di...

Critical language awareness 1 part II: Towards critical alternatives

Abstract. In this, the second of a two‐part paper, we briefly explore the notion of Critical Language Analysis (or Critical Linguistics in a generic sense), and indicate how this approach might contribute to more critical Language Awareness programmes. We also argue that the diverse objectives which are usually given for Language Awareness programmes appear to be given particular desocialising weightings in actual materials, and we suggest a way of articulating the various objectives that might accord with a critical perspective. We end with an example of how Critical Language Awareness can be incorporated into a family history writing project.

Materiality in children’s meaning-making practices

This article develops Kress and Van Leeuwen’s insight that material features combine with visual and linguistic features to convey meaning, showing how this is particularly true of the meaning-making practices of children. Taking examples from a corpus of project work by children aged 8-11 years, we identify the sorts of material resources they were drawing on and categorize the examples according to the types of meaning they carry, linking this categorization to Halliday’s three macro-functions of semiotic resources. We then provide examples of the ways in which physical characteristics provide traces of decision-making processes in the construction of a meaningful message, and of importation and adaptation of semiotic material from elsewhere. We end by suggesting that the practices we have observed represent a fast-changing period in the development of technologies of literacy and that awareness of the materiality of children’s meaning making may contribute to an understanding of the richness and complexity of literacy development.

Mapping literacy practices: theory, methodology, methods

The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) research project has been funded for three years from January 2004 as part of Phase 3 of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme in the UK. The project involves collaboration between two universities and four further education (FE) colleges. The intention is to investigate students’ everyday literacy practices and explore ways of mobilizing these to enhance their learning on college courses. The LfLFE project does not view literacy as a set of individual skills and competences alone, but as emergent and situated in particular social contexts (Barton et al., 2000). As such, literacy practices are not static or bounded spatially or temporally. A central concern for the project is to understand how the literacy demands of college life and being a student relate to students’ other literacy practices. As part of the work of the project, the group is undertaking a ‘mapping’ of the literacy demands associated with student learning across a wide range of FE courses. This paper explores the methodological debates in planning and operationalizing this mapping.

The scrumpled geography of literacies for learning

This paper draws upon the experience of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education research project in the UK. The project explored the literacy demands of a number of curriculum areas and the literacy practices of students in their everyday lives, in order to identify those ‘border literacies’ which may act as resources for learning and attainment within their college courses. Drawing on Literacy Studies and aspects of actor-network theory, this article outlines the conceptual innovations that we found necessary arising from our data analysis, extending existing work on situating practice and boundary crossing to posit a conceptual landscape that we term the scrumpled geography of literacies for learning. This landscape is one in which purification, naturalization and translation are key concepts, where literacy practices are enacted as network effects of a folding of a range of micro-practices into conglomerations.

Critical Discourse Analysis and Educational Change

Critical Discourse Analysis (C.D.A.) can contribute to educational change for individuals, for institutions and for societies. At the personal level, C.D.A. aims to empower learners by providing them with a critical analytical framework to help them reflect on their own language experiences and practices and on the language practices of others in the institutions of which they are a part and in the wider society within which they live. Learners have to decide whether to accommodate to all or some of the dominant practices (including the discoursal and generic conventions) which they encounter, or to challenge these by adopting alternative practices. By turning awareness into action — by choosing to adopt alternative practices in the face of pressure to conform to norms — people can contribute to their own emancipation and that of others by opening up new possibilities for linguistic behaviour. These new possibilities can contribute to change not only in the classroom but also in the wider institution of education and within societies as a whole.