2008 INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION (pp.

510514)
doi:10.1598/JAAL.51.6.7

LITERACY AND IDENTITY

Around the block and around

the world: Teaching literacy
across cultures
Bronwyn T. Williams
Williams teaches at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA; e-mail btwill02@louisville.edu.

Public places, the test rooms of virtue without

invigilators, are expecting your high score. This
notice, translated from the Chinese characters below it, hung above a trash can in a Beijing restaurant. It provoked a fair amount of laughter from
the U.S. and Canadian literacy scholars visiting
for a conference who spent several minutes trying
to make meaning from it. It then provoked an
equal amount of conversation about the difficulties of translation. We all agreed that it was still a
better translation from Chinese to English than
any of us could attempt in the other direction.
(The message of the sign, by the way, is that in
public places, when you are not being observed
for correct behavior, you need to behave properly
by throwing your trash away.)

America, and to China, and I have encountered

English in every placein street signs, in stores,
on television, and in conversations in the street.
After returning from the literacy conference I attended in China, I have continued to correspond
with students and teachers I met therealways in
English. Indeed, with a tendency I am embarrassed to admit, I have come to rely on the spread
of English during my travels to be able to negotiate my way through the world. My facility with
other languages is quite poor, and I have left more
than one person puzzled as I struggled to put together a sentence in a language I can only describe as Span-Italo-French. And just as likely is
that a passerby will hear my plight and help me
outin English.

What intrigued me as much as the issues of

translation, however, was that the sign had been
translated into English in the first place. Whats
more, the sign, while unconventional to be sure
for U.S. and Canadian readers, succeeded in communicating its message in the appropriate context. Communication had occurred.

Yet, as a combination of empires and global

capitalism have spread English usage around the
world, it is important to remember that there is
not now just one English but multiple world englishes. As many scholars and teachers have argued, language changes to adapt to different
cultural contexts. There is no longer a singular,
canonical English that either could or should be
taught any more. Cultural differences and rapidly
shifting communications media meant that the
very nature of the subject of literacy pedagogy was
changing rapidly (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 5).

The world, if not getting smaller, is certainly

communicating more quicklyand often in
English. While not the world traveler some are, I
have been to much of Europe, to parts of Latin

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Words, images, and video can now flow across national borders with ease. Yet the ease with which
texts can be transmitted across borders does not
mean reading and writing happens without the
influence of culture. Rain falls without noticing
borders, but the cultures on either side of a border
may describe the rain in very different ways. Lu
(2004), for example, described how a single word
such as public may have quite different connotations and linguistic histories in the United States
and in China. The result of this cultural difference
may be a difference in translation and word
choice in English that significantly shifts the
meaning of a text.
Yet this world of rapid cross-cultural communication is the world in which our students
read and write. In fact, many students, through email, instant messaging, or online games, are already engaged in reading and writing with young
people in other countries. They live their literate
lives with increasing contact with people in countries they may never visit, and their literate identities will be read by people in cultures unfamiliar
to them. How, then, do we teach reading and writing in an age of cross-cultural communication?
How will the emergence of multiple world englishes influence how we teach students about
standardized English and about issues of language, culture, and power? How do we respond to
students who are physically moving across borders
or who are immigrants or part of generation 1.5?
And how do we use the new technologies that allow us to communicate across borders as pedagogical tools to teach students about writing and
reading in a cross-cultural world?

English found in countries such as the United

States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. As Lu
(2004) pointed out, however, the sign may be both
comprehensible and conventional given the culture in which it was written and the cultural context of global power. She argued that multiple
world englishes were developed to serve the local
needs of people in their home cultures and to
sometimes create a form of resistance to the reach
of U.S. global economic and cultural power. The
designer of the Chinglish signs might be seen as a
resistant user of English working in concert with
Native Americans, African Americans, and peoples across the world to use English against the
englishes of their oppressors (Lu, 2004, p. 22).

Facing culture and literacy

The complex issues of power and culture in

relation to literacy practices came into sharp relief
for me a few years ago at a conference in Cuba.
During a roundtable discussion about the influence of culture on literacy education, a Cuban
scholar argued that having a uniform national
culture and language was essential for maintaining a strong national identity against the cultural
influences of a more powerful and hostile neighbor to the north. The government and the educational system, he said, were vital tools in
reinforcing and promoting a united language and
culture. In response, a colleague from South
Africa respectfully noted that the concept of a
uniform national culture and language, promoted
and maintained by government and schools, had
been used for years as a weapon of oppression of
people and cultures in her country. She said that
it continued to be a struggle to get students
whose cultures had been discounted and marginalized to value their own experiences and trust
schools as places where they could learn without
forfeiting their identities.

When faced with a translation like the sign I mentioned at the start of this column, the initial response by many from countries in which English
is the dominant language is to focus on the unconventional language use and grammar. The sentence is read as being in error and in need of
correction to comply with the conventions of

The complexities of literacy, culture, identity, and world englishes can often seem overwhelming and can lead to questions of whether
there is anything we can consider to be universal.
What values, ways of understanding the world,
and approaches to literacy can we assume we
share with people across cultures? When we say

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that a person is reading or writing in English, can

we be confident we know what is meant by that
statement? At the same time, we are faced with
questions of how we respond to values and approaches that seem quite different from our own.
Do we try to adapt to the differences or resist
them? Do we reach some kind of hybrid compromise or retreat with the desire to let differences
alone? Or do we shrug off such differences with a
cynical acceptance that some of them cannot be
overcome, so why bother?
Although it may not initially seem to get us
very far, the very recognition that literacy practices
are inextricable from culture is an important universal concept. Literacy, how it is defined, who gets
to employ it, and for what ends, is always culturally
contextual. Such contexts are shaped by local concerns and, increasingly, issues of global economics
and communication. Acknowledging the culturally
situated nature of reading and writing requires us
to not rush to judgment when we encounter a text
in English that has crossed borders. Instead, Lu
(2004) encouraged us to take a dual approach to
reading such texts and consider how we read them
against our cultural experiences and expectations
for standardized English writing as well as how
and why the individual writer may have composed
a text with features different than we expect.
If there is another universal truth concerning literacy practices across cultures it is that humans are meaning-making creatures. We all want
to be heard, to tell our stories, to communicate
our ideas to others. Reading and writing allow us
to connect our minds to otherseven when the
work may be detached from personal experience.
Literacy educators around the world must think
about how writing connects ideas and experiences to audiences. The questions of what motivates individuals to read and write are present,
even if only implicitly, in classrooms across cultures. When we write, we all hope to be understood. When we read, we hope to understand.
If the desires to make meaning and communicate with others are universal concepts in literacy,
the details of how we do so across cultures often

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run aground on the realities of our differences. We

assume, because we recognize the words as English,
that we can decode the meaning of the text. Yet
somehow the words and sentences dont make
sense. Or they make sense but are so different from
our conventions that we assume a level of linguistic, and perhaps even cognitive, deficiency on the
part of the other person. Obviously, apathy and unthinking relativism or cynicism about the impossibility of communication are not the answer. And
we cannot expect an adherence to our conventions
of English literacy that may run counter or be incomprehensible to another culture.
We can, however, turn to scholarship and
consider what literacy theorists and researchers
(Canagarajah, 2002; Fox, 1994; Harklau, Losey, &
Siegal, 1999; Lu, 2004; Schroeder, Fox, & Bizzell,
2002; Stein, 2007; Williams, 2003) have been describing in recent years about world englishes and
literacy education. We also need to be thinking
about how we can join dedicated teachers around
the world who are engaging these questions in ways
that explore how the language and literacy is growing and transforming students and their cultures.

Teaching literacy across

cultures
One important starting point for this exploration
of literacy is to find out from students about the
experiences they have had in reading and writing
across cultures. The degree to which this happens
depends on individual students, of course. Still, I
am no longer surprised when I find out that students have already been in contact with texts from
other parts of the world. For some students, it is
simply a matter of watching anime cartoons or
reading manga from Japan. For others, it is playing
video and computer games online with other
young people from every continent. Still other students have, through online games or fan fictions,
made friends in other countries with whom they
regularly converse through instant messaging and
e-mail. Compared with the experiences of their
teachers when they were young, many more of our

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students have had contact with texts and writing

from other cultures. Simply by engaging them in
conversations about what they have encountered,
understood, or been confused by, we can begin to
have useful discussions about how language and
literacy work in our contemporary world. To add
to the conversation, we can visit webpages in class
or, if the technology is not available, print out
pages and use them as starting points for thinking
about how communication is or is not effective.
Teachers who want to take a second step in
this exploration can engage students in discussions and assignments about how they would
communicate with a person in a different culture.
This means more than simply doing a report
about another country and its colorful customs.
The kinds of assignments I am talking about
would have students research the history of literacy in that culture. A student could find out when
reading and writing first emerged, who has traditionally been taught to read and write in the culture, how education was structured, and what
kind of writing has developed. The difference between Chinas ideographic writing and the
English phonetic alphabet is important in understanding how ideas are communicated. When did
English begin to be widely used in the country? Is
English taught in the schools? At what level is it
taught? What kind of reading and writing do
young people do in and out of school? What
kinds of stories, poems, and articles are traditionally valued? Obviously, the number of questions
students pursue depends on the level of the students. Yet even discussing some of these questions
can help students understand that reading and
writing are not static skillsthey develop and
change with a culture, including their own.
Finally, the technologies that allow literacy
to cross borders so easily are also available as pedagogical tools. Students can compare websites
from other cultures with sites they are familiar
with in their own, such as school websites. It
would be even better to put students into written
communication with their counterparts in other
countries as a way to bring life to the realities of

writing and reading across borders. Many teachers around the world create such opportunities
for their students. The necessity of negotiating
written communication across cultures reveals
for students the excitement and the frustration of
the endeavor. Regardless of what they are
discussinga common text, world events, popular culture, local life, the questions about literacy
education I mentioned abovestudents will find
that they learn a great deal through communication and miscommunication. Students realize
that their writing has a real audience and that the
cultural shorthand they may use with their local
friends online cant be depended on in order to
make themselves understood.
The key to learning in such a project lies in
the reflection the students engage in after they
have been online with students from other countries. Whether in discussion or in writing, it is the
questions we ask afterward, in terms of where the
difficulties and successes of reading and writing
occurred, that give students the chance to build
knowledge from their experiences. Such experiences make students face questions of what happens to identity when reading and writing move
across borders. Who has power? Who decides
what is correct, what is acceptable, and what is
persuasive? How did they think about the identities they wanted to present in their writing?
The novelist Caryl Phillips said that movement was the great narrative of the 20th century
(personal communication, December 16, 1994). As
the physical movement to which Phillips referred
continues, it has been supplemented and expanded
by the virtual movement made possible by new
technologies. We are all facing a world in which we
must read and write with people from other countries and other cultures. These technological possibilities challenge our ideas about how we make
meaning from experience and communicate that
meaning in words and images. I am a hopeful person. I have been touched by the kindness, curiosity,
and integrity of people everywhere I have traveled.
I believe that, contrary to the popular catchphrase
extolling economic globalization, the world is not

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flat. Culture and the literacy practices that are part

of culture create glorious mountains and valleys
and rivers that are simultaneously obstacles to
communication and new landmarks of understanding. If we are to navigate these unfamiliar literacy landscapes, we must learn to do so from
those who know them best. If we can both learn
from and teach others across borders then the opportunities for reading and writing across cultures
can, in the words of Fox (2007), help us transform
languages of harm into literacies of hope.

REFERENCES
Canagarajah, A.S. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies: The beginnings of an idea. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.),
Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 38). London: Routledge.

Fox, H. (1994). Listening to the world: Cultural issues in academic writing. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers
of English.
Fox, R. (2007, July). Literacies of harm and hope. Paper presented at the ChinaU.S. Conference on Literacy, Beijing,
China.
Harklau, L., Losey, K.M., & Siegal, M. (Eds.). (1999).
Generation 1.5 meets college composition: Issues in the
teaching of writing to U.S.-educated learners of ESL.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lu, M. (2004). An essay on the work of composition:
Composing English against the order of fast capitalism.
College Composition and Communication, 56, 1650.
Schroeder, C., Fox, H., & Bizzell, P. (Eds.). (2002). ALT DIS:
Alternative discourses and the academy. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann Boynton/Cook.
Stein, P. (2007). Multimodal pedagogies in diverse classrooms.
London: Routledge.
Williams, B.T. (2003). Speak for yourself? Power and hybridity in the cross-cultural classroom. College
Composition and Communication, 54, 586609.

The department editor welcomes reader comments. Bronwyn T. Williams teaches at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA; e-mail
btwill02@louisville.edu

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