A Sociocultural Approach to Reading,Language and LiteracyI. What taking a socio

A Sociocultural Approach to Reading, Language and Literacy
    Good morning. Today’s lecture is to introduce you to sociocultural approaches to literacy learning. First, I want to look very briefly at what taking a sociocultural approach actually means. Then,I want to ask about the implications of taking a socio-cultural approach to literacy research. And finally, I want to outline three principles for you to consider.
    First of all,what does taking a sociocultural approach actually mean? Just a few points; (1) What a sociocultural approach does is that it rejects the difference between psychology and anthropology. So often we have research studies in psychology, which focus on the individual,on cognition,on the experimental,the analytic,and on explaining , whereas anthropological studies have often focused on culture, the group, on observation,on the holistic approach, and on description. (2) But the crucial point about sociocultural research is that it really transcends academic disciplines. It’s not just interdisciplinary,it actually transcends disciplines. And it focuses on the inevitable link between culture and cognition through engagement in activities, tasks, or events.
    As part of a sociocultural approach, it is crucial that we understand the role of mediators of culture, those who actually facilitate the taking of one language or one culture into another; our mother tongue teachers in schools, and our indigenous language teachers in countries where there are indigenous language teachers in teaching. Or, indeed, siblings who are older and able to facilitate the movement of young children from one culture and language to another.
    Part two of what I want to address briefly is" What are the implications of taking a sociocultural approach?"! want to illustrate that particularly through a package of Persil laundry soap. Now, I don’t know whether everybody has Persil. I assume that it’s a big multinational, so everyone does know about Persil. But a colleague of mine, Ann Williams, with whom I’ve done a lot of work, came rushing in one day when we were in the middle of our siblings project and said," Look at this. This is exactly what we are fighting against. How are we going to manage it?"
    And just look! Here is a wonderful illustration of how fixed we often are in the Western hierarchy of cultures. This package of Persil, produced in the" Year of Reading" ,was pushing a familiar cultural practice in the West;the bedtime story. Now, what you see on the package is the white middle-class mother with her sparkling white blouse and her little girl with her sparkling white outfit on the sheets, holding a teddy bear and looking at a book—illustrating the bedtime story.
    And so, following up from that, I want just to highlight what I think are some implications of taking a sociocultural approach. (5) One is recognizing the importance of home and community literacy practices and learning styles, and how these are taken from home to school.
    Second, (6) it means realizing bilingualism and biliteracy as giving cognitive, social,and cultural advantages. Cecelia Thorne’s talked about this,and I’m sure that we all know it—so I’m not going to go on about it at length. But in many British schools,it is not considered an advantage to be bilingual unless you speak a prestigious language—or what we refer to as" elite bilingualism". (7) Taking a sociocultural approach also means tracing the syncretism taking place as children blend new and old practices. Nobody and certainly not young children—is fixed in any particular way of learning. As we traced the learning of siblings together, we noticed how crucially they have been blending strategies from home, from their community language classes, and from their English schools to produce a new type of literacy learning. Taking a sociocultural approach means understanding the crucial role of "important others "who assist pupils in the learning process. These might be people from school,like indigenous language teachers or mother tongue teachers, or they might be grandparents, siblings,aunts,uncles,neighbors. They do not have to be parents. Also for me, (8) taking a sociocultural approach means enabling participants in your research to express their own understanding of the learning process. It’s very, very easy to go from our own assumptions, but we need to go from our participants’ understandings.
    And so finally, the three principles I want to highlight: The first is based on Michael Cole’s expression;" Where culture and cognition create each other. " (9) It’s to uncover the language and literacy knowledge held by people, as well as ways of learning in their communities, and to become clear about how these may either contra-diet or complement those which count in school.
    The second principle is based on Jerome Burner’s expression," (10) The joint culture creation between teacher and pupil. "We need to document the role of crucial mediators of languages and literacies in different contexts and how this mediation takes place in the dynamic syncretism emerging,so that new and existing practices come together.
    And for the final principle, I go back to Fred Erickson, a very brilliant ethnographer , who says," What ethnography is all about is giving a voice to those whose voices would not otherwise have been heard. "And so,crucially,my third principle is to go from what people themselves view as being important in education in their lives, rather than from what we think they should be seeing as important.
    Those are the three principles that I want to conclude with; Uncovering the funds of knowledge in peoples’ lives; looking at the joint culture creation between teacher and pupil; and giving pupils and their families a voice in their own education. That is all for the lecture. Thank you!