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

So the conference proved to be a microcosm of the entire field, revealing a fair amount of conflict and some confusion. That the conference was unable to fulfill the hopes that we had for it prompts this warning: A field divided into warring camps is not a profession.

An agreed-upon body of knowledge is typical of and I will go further and say, essential to a true profession. Although an enormous amount of writing and research has focused on various aspects of reading, it is sad to have to acknowledge that this work has not coalesced into an agreed-upon body of knowledge about the content or form of reading instruction, particularly beginning reading instruction. (Richard Andersen's Introduction to Osborn & Lehr,1998, pp. 2-3)

What can we make of a situation in which an official report to the government claims consensus and confidence at the same time that a volume funded by foundations claims no such consensus and displays little confidence? In fact, the situation is worse than such contradictions might indicate, with potentially serious consequences for children in our schools. The reading debates are interminable and inconclusive, I believe, because they frame the issues and problems too narrowly in terms of "reading," construed as what the Academy report calls "real reading," that is, decoding, word recognition, and comprehension of "literal meaning," rather than in terms of language, literacy, and learning as they are situated within multiple sociocultural practices in and out of schools. If we do not begin to transform debates about reading into debates about language, literacy, and learning (which, of course, greatly broadens the relevant research base), then, I predict, we will soon face another and new "crisis": elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms will be filled with children who have successfully passed basic reading tests by the third grade and yet cannot use language (oral or written) to learn, to master content, to work in the new economy, or to think critically about social and political affairs.

Ironically, one can argue for a wider "literacy and learning" viewpoint, rather than a narrower "reading" one, by a close study of the Academy report itself, despite its often narrow focus on the "skills" of"real reading" At the same time, an approach that seeks to uncover an alternative perspective within the report itself will allow me to introduce a New Literacy Studies viewpoint on reading, a viewpoint that disavows dichotomies between, and debates over, phonics and whole language. It disavows these not by "blending" the two, but by disavowing both of them as they are construed in the current reading debates. The New Literacy Studies argue for a focus not on reading, but, rather, on oral and written language as composed of diverse, but closely interrelated "tools" (mediating devices, Wertsch,1998) for learning, development, and activity within concrete social practices at specific, socioculturally diverse sites like schools, homes, communities, and workplaces.