Introductiontospecialissueliterariness.pdf

Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, 2013

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English in Education, 2012

Literacies: social, cultural and historical perspectives. By Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel. Peter Lang Education (2011). 366 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4331-1024-5 (hardcover); 978-1-4331-1023-8 (paperback). This collection brings together only a small selection of Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel's many publications in New Literacy Studies (Lankshear's online research and publications list runs to 49 pages). Their partnership mirrors the dual aspect of New Literacy Studies: new ways of thinking about literacy and new (mainly digital) forms of literacy. Lankshear and Knobel met in 1992, when Lankshear had already published papers on popular literacy that are reproduced in this volume. Knobel was already alert to technology-led changes in literacy forms: she had begun programming in logo within her teacher education programme in 1984. The essays in this book form a history of the development of their thinking, and of the developing paradigms of New Literacy Studies, over more than 20 years. The volume encourages us to evaluate their achievement in the kind of academic polemic that they have made their own. The first chapters, by Lankshear alone, engage with the socio-historical meaning of literacy. "Ideas of Functional Literacy", written in 1985, warns policymakers in his native New Zealand of the dangers of following American and British practice by promoting programmes in "functional" literacy. The problems of this concept have been rehearsed many times, but Lankshear's critique is fundamental: the ambitions inscribed in the concept are politically naive, if not wilfully perverse; literacy is not a panacea for social ills. "There is simply no chance that making all people functionally literate can put them in the way of a job" (p.11). Functional literacy, Lankshear argues, is an exercise in domestication, and the values underlying such programmes are dehumanising. "The Dawn of the People", from 1986, describes a very different kind of literacy programme, through which more than 406,000

Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies, 2021

This chapter explores the effects of literariness on readers' psychological and social understandings within and beyond literary texts. Literariness is introduced as (a) a function of specific textual features that create linguistic foregrounding and (b) the positioning of a text as literary through para-textual signifiers (such as non-fiction and fiction labelling). After a brief review of the history of research on literariness, we discuss empirical studies of the role of paratext (such as non-fiction and fiction labelling) in the processing of texts and connect this research to the concepts of identification and perspective taking. We introduce research on readers' responses to the formal features of narrative and highlight the role of literary techniques in the non-literary context of journalism.

2011

This book presents sixteen essays in the new literacy studies tradition, written during the period 1985-2010. It covers a diverse range of themes with a particular emphasis on topics of cultural, political and historical interest. The collection includes both previously published and unpublished works, and is organized in four sections.

Poetics, 1998

The assumption that formal features in literary texts typically shape response, which has been a theme of literary theory almost since its beginnings, has been rejected by poststructuralist critics. If formal features are considered, they argue, this is because social or institutional conventions direct readers' attention to them. We argue that this claim is unsupported by empirical study. Studies designed to confirm the conventionalist position in fact show the reverse. Our examination of readers' judgements of literariness in two studies, Hoffstaedter (1989) and Hanauer (1996), and a review of our own findings (Miall and Kuiken, 1994), suggest that response to formal features is based on human psychobiological, cognitive, and psycholinguistic processes. We conclude with some observations about why response to formal features may be a significant part of literary reading.

2002

A new literacies sampler, 2007

Literacy is a prerequisite for full participation in a modern, technological society. For the nation, broad-based literacy is a prerequisite for the effective functioning of democratic institutions at home and for continued competitiveness in an increasingly complex world. We think of the United States as a highly literate nation, and in the sense that nearly all citizens can read and write at a minimal level, it is. But full literacy implies far more than basic reading and writing proficiency. It implies an enculturation into ways of thinking, interpreting, and using language in a variety of complex activities and settings, typical of a rapidly changing and technologically advanced society. Moreover, it implies that this enculturation is widespread throughout the population. In both these senses, the U.S. is only partially literate. A good indicator of our current state of literacy is the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report on literacy in young adults. This report showed that 95% of the young adults in the U.S. could read and understand the printed word. Yet only a small percentage could carry out moderately complex tasks using their literacy skills. These tasks were relevant to the real world of work and daily life, such as locating and using information in tables, graphs, forms and schedules, or applying arithmetic operations in combination with printed materials, as in balancing a checkbook or completing an order form. There was a dramatic dropoff in the number of young adults who could succeed as the tasks became even moderately difficult. Furthermore, minority subjects performed even less well than non-minority subjects in the study. On tasks such as synthesizing the main argument from a lengthy newspaper column or examining a menu, computing the cost of a specified meal and determining the correct change from a specified amount, only about 40% of the White subjects, 10% of the Black subjects and 20% of the Hispanic subjects were successful. Results such as these highlight a pervasive failure on the part of our schools in teaching the analytic and critical thinking skills that underlie high level literacy, a failure that disproportionately affects low-income and minority students. This failure makes a mockery of the principles of equal opportunity and equal access to schooling, and threatens America's standing as a technologically competitive nation. Previous research on reading and writing in this country has had a limited positive impact on educational practice. This is, in part, because research has tended to fragment the phenomenon of literacy. Studies have isolated aspects such as the texts students produce or read, students' individual cognitive processes while composing or comprehending text, and the social and institutional settings in which literacy practices take place. But ignoring the complex interrelations among the individual, social, and textual creates fundamental obstacles to understanding what it means to acquire literacy skills in school. It provides at best only partial solutions to teachers who