UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE CHIMBORAZO

FACULTAD CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACION HUMANAS Y TECNOLOGIAS

CARRERA DE IDIOMAS
Name: Abigail Garrido
Course: 7th Semester
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF LITERACY
Recent years have witnessed a rejection of what is now perceived to be an elitist and colonialist
kind of literacy. The primitive vs. civilized dichotomy implied by of one Great Divide
between oral cultures (with Little or no use of writing) and literate cultures (with a fuller
utilization of writing and print) , taken for granted until twenty years ago, is now put in
question. Individual literacy has given way to the notion of multiple literacies as a plural set of
social practices within social contexts of use. Thus, besides the traditional belletristic literacy,
scholars now recognize other sorts of literacies linked to various genres (for example, literary
Literacy, press literacy, instructional manuals literacy, scientific literacy) that all have to do with
the mastery of, or fluent control over, social uses of print language. In this regard to be literate
means not only to be able to encode and decode the written word or to do exquisite text
analyses; it is the capacity to understand and manipulate the social and cultural meanings of
print language in thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Literacy, because is not acquired naturally like orality and is usually learned in schools has long
been confused with schooling. The cognitive skills claimed to devolve naturally from the ability
to read and write have been shown to be due not to the written language per se, but to a distinct
kind of schooling that prizes certain uses of language over others, whether it be spoken or
written. The general educational value given to the ability to talk like a book- i.e. to narrate
events in clearly organized, analytical fashion, to construct an argument according to the logic
of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or problem-evidence-solution- to, respond to what and why
questions on texts, to convey information clearly and succinctly-stems from a belief that a
context-reduced, topic-centered literacy is useful for all in all walks of life. Not everyone shares
this belief, however, some argue that inn occupations like the service or the marketing
industries, or in the writing of novels or poems, other types of literacies are required, that
schools traditionally do not impart.
Furthermore, children from different social backgrounds bring to school different types of
literacies, not all of which are validated by school literacy practices. For example, in the United
States, children from African-American families might display a highly context-embedded,
analogic, associative way of telling or writing stories that the school doesnt recognize as
acceptable literate practice, whereas middle-class Anglos might have from home they find
reinforced in the way schools teach texts.
It the acquisition of literacy is more than a matter of learning a saw technology, but is
indissociably to the values social practices, and ways of knowing promoted in educational
institutions, it may become the source of cultural conflict when the values of the school do not
match those of the home. Such as the case in Alaska and Northern Canada, for examples, where
the Athabaskans ways of learning and knowing are radically different from those mainstreams
Anglo-Canadian and Anglo-American society. Even if they learn to read and write in English,

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE CHIMBORAZO

FACULTAD CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACION HUMANAS Y TECNOLOGIAS

CARRERA DE IDIOMAS
Name: Abigail Garrido
Course: 7th Semester
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Athabaskan children resist adopting Anglo-Saxon schooling practices that expect them, for
example, to state their opinion about a text, take a point of view and defend it, display their

abilities in front of others in the class, and speculate about future events-all verbal behaviors
that are considered inappropriate in their own culture.
The two perspectives on literacy-literacy as mastery of the written medium, literacy as social
practices-correspond to two different ways of viewing a stretch of written language: as text or as
discourse. Each one has a different relation to the cultural context in which it is produced and
received.
CULTURE AUNTHENTICITY
Match of the discussion surrounding the native speaker has been focused around two concepts:
authenticity and appropriateness. By analogy with the creation of standard languages, nation
states have promoted a standardized notion of cultural authenticity that has served to rally
emotional identification both at home and abroad. Stereotypes, like French chic, German knowhow, American casualness, are shorthand symbols, readily recognized and applied to their
respective realities; they help draw cultural boundaries between Us and others in order to
appreciate the uniqueness of both. Language learners, keen on slipping into someone elses
shoes by learning their language, attach great importance to the cultural authenticity of French
bread us German train schedules and the cultural appropriateness of Japanese salutations of
Chinese greeting ceremonies. Their desire to learn the language of others is often coupled with a
desire to behave and think like them in order to ultimately be recognized and validated by them.
However two factors are putting the notion of authenticity and appropriateness in language
learning into question. First, the diversity of authenticities within one national society,
depending on such contextual variables as age, social status, gender, ethnicity, race; what is
authentic in one context might be inauthentic in another. Second, the undesirability of imposing
on learners a concept of authenticity that might devalue their own authentic selves as learners.
This cultural appropriateness may need to be replaced by the concept of appropriation,
whereby learners make a foreign language and culture their own by adapting and it to their own
needs and interests. The ability to acquire another person`s language and understand someone
else`s culture while retaining one`s own is one aspect of a more general ability to mediate
between several languages and cultures, called cross-cultural, intercultural or multicultural
communication.