Abstract
It is now some twenty-five years since Literacy Studies took a new direction, turning away from questions of pedagogy and the psycholin-guistic processes of the individual reader–writer and looking outside the classroom to study literacy in its social context. Foundational works in this approach were Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words (Heath 1983) and Brian Street’s Literacy in Theory and Practice (Street 1984). Both studies memorably shifted the focus of literacy research onto domains and contexts beyond the classroom. Along with Scribner and Cole’s landmark Psychology of Literacy (Scribner &Cole 1981) which again emphasized the local and contextual practices by which literacy operates in social groups these are what Baynham (2004) calls the first-generation Literacy Studies. Second generation works such as Barton and Hamilton (1998), Besnier (1993), Kulick and Stroud (1993), Prinsloo and Breier (1996) developed these approaches in a series of significant empirical studies. In this book we ask what the future of Literacy Studies is, inviting a number of scholars actively involved in shaping the field of Literacy Studies both to take stock of the current state of activity and to point to future directions for literacy research. In doing so, this book provides an introduction to current third-generation empirical work which is pushing the boundaries of literacy research in a number of key directions: the focus has shifted from the local to the translocal, from print based literacies to electronic and multimedia literacies and from the verbal to the multimodal.
a practice is a mediated action with a history.
Scollon 2001: 66
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© 2009 Mike Baynham and Mastin Prinsloo
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Baynham, M., Prinsloo, M. (2009). Introduction: the Future of Literacy Studies. In: Baynham, M., Prinsloo, M. (eds) The Future of Literacy Studies. Palgrave Advances in Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245693_1
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