Critical issues: Reading and the new literacy studies: Reframing the National Academy of Sciences report on reading

Journal of Literacy Research, Sep 1999 by Gee, James Paul

This article is a reflection on the recent report from the National Academy of Sciences, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. This report, typical of many recent discussions of early reading instruction, centers on psycholinguistic aspects of reading having to do with phonological awareness, decoding word recognition, and literal comprehension. l seek to reframe the report from the perspective of the New Literacy Studies, an interdisciplinary effort that takes a sociocultural approach to language and literacy. My approach is to stress tensions internal to the report itself as pressure points around which one could imagine a different sort of report being written, one more in the spirit of the New Literacy Studies. l take up issues such as whether or not there is a consensus in the reading field; the nature of the "literacy crisis"; relationships among reading, poverty, racism, and culture; whether or not technology leads to higher literacy demands; learning to read as against learning content; and the connections among phonological awareness, early language abilities, and the use of specific genres and registers in school.

OVER THE LAST FEW DECADES, Work stemming from a variety of dif ferent disciplines has begun to coalesce in a framework now sometimes called the "New Literacy Studies" (for overviews, see Barton,1994; Gee, 1996; Street, 1995; for classic early work, see Heath,1983; Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Street,1984). The New Literacy Studies approach literacy as part and parcel of, and inextricable from, specific social, cultural, institutional, and political practices. Thus, literacy is, in a sense, "multiple": literary becomes different"literacies;' as reading and writing are differently and distinctively shaped and transformed inside different sociocultural practices. Additionally, these sociocultural practices always have inherent and value-laden, but often different, implications about what count as "acceptable" identities, actions, and ways of knowing. They are, in this sense, deeply "political." Furthermore, these practices always fully integrate language, both oral and written, with nonlanguage "stuff," that is, with ways of acting, interacting, feeling, valuing, thinking, and believing, as well as with various sorts of nonverbal symbols, sites, tools, objects, and technologies. Thus, the New Literacy Studies seek, as well, always to study literacy and literacy learning as they are integrated with oral language, social activities, material settings, and distinctively cultural forms of thinking, knowing, valuing, and believing.

I want, in this article, to reflect on the recent report of the National Academy of Sciences on reading (Snow, Burns, & Griffin,1998). I want not so much to critique the report as to reframe it from the perspective of the New Literacy Studies. My approach is to stress tensions internal to the report itself. These tensions are the pressure points along which, I would argue, a different report, one more in the spirit of the New Literacy Studies, could have been imagined (even using the same research material as that surveyed in the report itself).

Debates over reading are now as much the concern of the media and politicians as they are of academics and teachers. It says much about these public debates, however, that volumes published by experts in reading contradict each other as to whether or not there is a consensus in the field. For example, the preface to the National Academy of Sciences report claims that there is now "peace" and consensus in the reading field: The study reported in this volume was undertaken with the assumption that empirical work in the field of reading had advanced sufficiently to allow substantial agreed-upon results and conclusions that could form a basis for breaching the differences among the warring parties. The process of doing the study revealed the correctness of the assumption that this has been an appropriate time to undertake a synthesis of the research on early reading development. The knowledge base is now large enough that the controversies that have dominated discussions of reading development and reading instruction have given way to a widely honored pax lectura, the conditions of which include a shared focus on the needs and rights of all children to learn to read. (pp. v-vi)

The Academy report appeared at the same time as a volume (Osborn & Lehr,1998) from a conference attended by an equally renowned group of experts, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Reading, with the support of the Carus, the Ball, the Johnson, and the McDougal Foundations. The introduction to this volume claims that there is, in fact, no "peace" and little consensus in the reading field:

[The] ... hope was that the conference would help to end the confusion over the ways and means of teaching reading and writing and, thus, to lay the foundation for a.national agenda that educators, schools, and states might use to make reasoned decisions about instruction....