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

However, the correlation between language abilities and success in learning to read, and in school generally, as it is talked about in the Academy report, hides an important reality Almost all children - including poor children - have impressive language abilities. The vast majority of children enter school with large vocabularies, complex grammar, and deep understandings of experiences and stories. It has been decades since anyone believed that poor and minority children entered school with "no language" (Gee,1996; Labov, 1972).

The verbal abilities that children who fail in school fail to have are not just some general Set of such abilities, but rather specific verbal abilities tied to school practices and school-based knowledge. The children whose vocabularies are larger in ways that enhance their early school success, for instance, are children who know, and especially can use, more words tied to the forms of language that schools use (and other areas of life that recruit "academic" language). A focus on phonological awareness can hide a wider paradox about school success: the more you already know about school itself, and in particular, about school-based language and school practices (not just language "in general" or how much phonemic awareness you have), before you go to school, the better you do in school.

Social Languages and the "Code"

Recent controversies over"whole language" and phonics have misled people into thinking that the most important design feature of written language is the phono (sound) - graphic (writing) "code" that relates sounds (phonemes) to letters. This is a mistake. The design features of written language are, of course, far more extensive than this. For example, just as sounds map to letters in written language, certain forms of vocabulary, syntax (sentence structure), and discourse connectors (devices that connect sentences together to make a whole integrated text) map to specific styles of written language and the oral forms related to these. Following is an example taken from a school science textbook (from Martin 1990, p. 93):

1. The destruction of a land surface by the combined effects of abrasion and removal of weathered material by transporting agents is called erosion .... The production of rock waste by mechanical processes and chemical changes is called weathering.

A whole bevy of design features mark these sentences as part of a distinctive "register" or style of academic language (what I have elsewhere called a"social language," see Gee,1996). Some of these features are"heavy subjects" ("the production of rock waste by mechanical processes and chemical changes"); processes and actions named by nouns or nominalizations, rather than verbs ("production"); passive main verbs ("is called") and passives inside nominalizations ("production by mechanical means"); modifiers that are more informative than the nouns they modify ("transporting agents"); and complex embedding ("weathered material by transporting agents" is a nominalization embedded inside "the combined effects of ...;' and this more complex nominalization is embedded inside a yet larger nominalization, "the destruction of ...").