Verdad, sentido colectivo y mundo íntegro de la obra de arte, en Gadamer

The field of language and literacy education contains a vast amount of research espousing multiple perspectives on the nature of literacy teaching and learning. In the review of literature that follows, I have chosen to discuss five intersecting bodies of work: (a) sociocultural theory (b) semiotics (c) young children’s language and literacy development (d) digital literacies, and (e) parents and grandparents as researchers in literacy studies. I selected these bodies of theory and research because they have both positioned me in this research and informed my thinking throughout the process of data collection and analysis. I present studies and theory organized in this way to provide a context for this study theoretically, conceptually, and methodologically.

Sociocultural Theory Sociocultural theory is an approach which emphasizes the social worlds within which language learning occurs and the ways in which those worlds create and are created by cognition and is made up of a rich history of qualitative researchers who seek to illuminate the ways in which human development and learning are socially and culturally constructed (Gregory, et al., 2004; Rogoff, 1990; Street, 1995). As Perry

(2012) points out there is no single sociocultural theory on language and literacy learning. According to this approach, learning is deeply embedded in the daily social interactions of the learner and the very nature of what defines literacy within a society is determined

Sociocultural theory has been contextualized within a long tradition of rich, ethnographic studies involving home and community literacies, literacy as social practice, studies in multiple literacies, and most recently, critical sociocultural studies that examine power structures and issues of privilege and oppression, and continues to expand what is known about the nature of language and literacy development. Through this review of literature concerning sociocultural theory, I provide (a) a brief historical overview, and

(b) the basic tenets of sociocultural theory. A Brief Historical Overview

A sociocultural approach to studies in language and literacy grew out of multiple disciplines and has its foundation in psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and

linguistics. Drawing on methods from the field of anthropology, sociocultural researchers find real-world settings the best laboratory in which to observe the nature of literacy learning (Genishi & Dyson, 2005, 2009; Wolcott, 1995). Grounded in the work of

Vygotsky (1978) a sociocultural perspective suggests that learning is a process of making use of tools for thinking made available by individuals within communities, cultures, or societies who initially act as interpreters and guides as children grow and develop (Razfar & Gutiérrez, 2003; Rogoff, 1990).

Central to Vygotsky’s theory was the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Vygotsky defined it as: “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). Chaiklin (2003)

person on a task, such that the less competent person becomes independently proficient at what was initially a jointly-accomplished task” (p. 2). Vygotsky viewed language as a tool of thought. Vygotsky (1978) wrote, “Thought is born through words” (p. 282). For Vygotsky, speech played a critical role in the child’s learning in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Language is one of those tools for thinking which we use to make sense of the world. Lindfors (1987) writes: “Because language supports our going beyond, it makes a significant contribution toward our comprehending and learning, toward our building a theory of the world which includes what is and is not, and also

what could be” (p. 272). Building on Vogotsky’s work and groundbreaking ethnographic studies in the

field expands this notion to recognize the importance of social interactions in home and community settings (Dantas & Mnyak, 2010; Gonzallez, et al., 1992; Heath, 1983, 2012; Moll & Greenburg, 1990). Wells (1999) wrote “learning and teaching in the ZPD is clearly dependent on social interactions and, in educational settings, this most typically involves face-to-face interactions mediated by speech” (p. 3). Language, then, serves as

one way of mediating the world.

Home and community literacies. In the past twenty-five years, the work of researchers grounded in sociocultural theory have brought about great advances in the field of language and literacy through conducting ethnographic studies in home and community settings (Gregory, et al., 2004; Heath 1983, 2012; Long, 1998, 2004, 2008; Genishi and Dyson, 2005, 2009; Rogoff, 1990, 2003). Many studies have considered out of school literacies and the ways in which children learn beyond the school walls (Dantas & Manyak, 2010; Gregory et al., 2004; Hull & Shultz, 2002; Long et al., 2008; Vasquez,

2005). Other researchers have explored the ways in which individuals use language and the functions they serve in their day to day lives (Gee & Hayes, 2011; Harste, et al., 1984; Lindfors, 1987).

Case study in home and community settings. The extensive ethnographic study conducted by anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath (1983, 2012) contributed greatly to what is known about literacy development and the tremendous influence of home cultures on a child’s success or failure due to the way in which schools privilege certain literacies over others. Her initial study took her into the field for almost a decade as she studied the culture and literacy practices of the members of two communities located in a rural, southern location that she named Trackton and Roadville (Heath, 1983). She rejected the notion that class and race were the source of failure for many children in schools, and her work illuminated the fact that there are many literacies and discourse structures present in home environments that are not validated or recognized in schools; therefore, success in school and work settings is measured on a narrow understanding of what counts as

teaching, learning, and literacy. Recently Heath (2012) has chronicled the past three decades as the families faced economic and social challenges of the new millennium including economic hardships and adjusting to the highly technological world in which they live (Heath, 2012). Heath further investigated the ways the families negotiated and communicated in digital environments. In many ways, this most recent work focused more on the deficits within the lives of these families as the challenges of economic hardships, the disbanding of the centrality of the communities through moving to other locations to live and work, and the ways that technology had at times impeded social and emotional growth within the youth

impacting their lives negatively. She found that the families engaged less in the kinds of deliberate talk that helped young children develop competencies for problem solving or self-monitoring throughout their lives.

Additional studies in home and community settings have worked to illuminate the richly literate environments that children live and play in within home and community settings. These studies have helped to expand the definition of what counts as literacy beyond traditional school-style literacy and recognize the funds of knowledge that children bring from home and community (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) as well as the ways children learn from the networks of support in their lives (Gregory, et al., 2004). These studies provide evidence of the rich contexts in which children interact within multilingual and multicultural contexts and challenge the deficit model that has pervaded public sentiment, as well as public policy, in school settings. In looking closely at several of these studies, it is apparent that, as Dantas & Manyak (2010) purported, children come to learning experiences well equipped with many resources from their home and

community.

Home and school literacies in urban settings. Other influential ethnographic studies conducted in home and community settings have had a tremendous impact on the field. The work of ethnographers Denny Taylor and Catherine Dorsey-Gaines (1988) contributed greatly to what was known about the importance of home and school literacies. They specifically looked at how children growing up in urban poverty

developed literacy. Their research was conducted in the home setting and demonstrated the importance of family involvement in the literacy development of children. Their ethnographic study of families living in urban poverty challenged the notion that the

homes lacked literacy. They found that the families engaged in many acts of literacy including such things as reading for a variety of purposes including information,

socialization, and recreation, as well as writing for information, entertainment, and to aid memory. Their work demonstrated a richly literate environment and that school failure should be attributed to the failure of schools to tap into family literacies rather than the

lack thereof. These and many other researchers have worked to counter the narrative of the

prevailing deficit model which views children from marginalized communities as lacking the skills needed to be successful in school and focuses on what they do not know

(Gonzalez, 2006; Haight, 2001; Long, Volk & Gregory, 2007; Long, et al., 2008; McCarty; 2003. Much research has been conducted in the area of language acquisition and learning in marginalized cultures (Boutte, 2007; Delpit, 1996; Delpit & Dowdy, 2002; Neito, 2000; Ogulnick, 2000) and researchers continue to work to expand and inform the field. These and other studies have explored the many ways that language and literacy are culturally bound, and have begun to bridge the gap between learning in and out of school by recognizing that all children come to school with a rich history of language development on which to build. Ogulnick (2000) described her own journey as a language learner and her awareness that we are “socialized into a culture through words, tone, and implicit understandings of one’s place, and that there are penalties for people who violate the rules.” (p. 1). This resonated with me as I considered other studies which have helped me to understand how language is closely tied to issues of power and the political nature of literacy (Janks, 2010; Kinloch, 2012; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988).

New literacy studies. Sociocultural researchers work to expand current constructs about the nature of language and literacy. This is precisely what a group of researchers did in the last decade of the 20th century through the new literacy studies. The work of The New London Group (1991), a team of 10 leading researchers in the field of language and literacy studies, advanced the current understanding of literacy to encompass

multiple literacies (Luke & Freebody, 1997). These and other researchers called for a paradigm shift that recognized the many ways that language is used to make meaning and facilitate learning in and across various cultural settings in a global and technologically connected world. Researchers continue to work to examine the ways in which language learners are making meaning through new technologies and within real and virtual spaces. These researchers will be explored more deeply as I examine digital literacies

later in this review of literature.

Basic Tenets of Sociocultural Theory

Researchers in the field seek to examine the ways in which individuals use and learn literacy in the world and strategies and teaching/learning partners supporting that learning. Research grounded in sociocultural theory is most often ethnographic and its emphasis on thick-rich description, provides researchers with a way to “expose a culture’s normalcy without reducing its particularity” (Gertz, 1973, p. 17). Perhaps the greatest contribution sociocultural researchers have made to the field of language and literacy is in helping to begin to bring about a paradigm shift in the way culture, language, and literacy are perceived and defined. The lens through which individuals conceive of culture is influenced by their beliefs. Ladson- Billings (1995) writes, “We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs” (p. 46).

Truth is often tied to what a person knows or has been taught to believe through the process of acculturation as opposed to valuing the truths of those who may hold differing perspectives. Many people, and quite often educators, view knowledge as truth, but what is a truth to one culture is an untruth to another (Souto-Manning, 2010). Likewise, assumptions about what may be true for the culture of one family may not be true for

another.

Redefining culture. Many researchers resist defining culture because as Street (1995) contended, the very nature of culture defies definition. Far too often culture is narrowly defined by characteristics that accentuate the differences among people and these differences can be perceived as deficits (Dantas & Mantak 2010). Gutiérrez (2008) called for a re-envisioning of culture not as a noun, but as a verb that defines culture through the actions and practices individuals engage in rather than the characteristics that define differences from the dominant mainstream culture (Street, 1995; Street & Heath, 2008). For sociocultural theorists, culture is then conceived of as a dynamic ever- changing phenomenon as individuals use language and literacy to engage in social practice. As members of a culture appropriate new tools to solve problems or do work, they apprentice young learners into these new social practices through purposeful

interactions as they engage in those practices together (Rogoff, 1990). Literacy as social practices. Literacy is a somewhat illusive term to define, and

in fact, Janks (2010) points out that many languages do not even have a word for the concept. Once thought of in narrow terms as the opposite of illiteracy particularly as related to abilities to access print-based media, literacy is now seen in much broader terms. Street (1995) challenged the prevailing notion of literacy as the ability to read and

write in the dominant language of a culture when he argued that literacy is social practice. Barton and Hamilton (2000) expanded the understanding of literacy as social practice, focusing their work on social relationships rather than a set of discrete skills or set of properties within individuals. Much like Street (1995) they differentiate between literacy events and literacy practices, defining literacy events as “activities where literacy has a role” (p. 8). Literacy practices are “the general cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw upon in their lives” (p. 7) and are governed by social institutions and power relationships.

Theorists who espouse a sociocultural stance believe that children engage in literacy events and develop literacy practices within intricate social networks (Long & Volk, 2007) and spin what Geertz (1973) describes as intricate webs of significance. It is within these intricate webs that children participate in cultural activities with the guidance of more skilled partners allowing them to internalize the tools for thinking and for taking more mature approaches to problems that children have practiced in a social context (Vygotsky, 1978).

Mediated learning. Key to learning according to a sociocultural approach is the mediation of learning by others and within social situations (Gregory & Long, 2004). Feuerstein and Lewin-Benham (2012) define mediating children’s learning as “any interaction in which an adult intends to convey a particular meaning or skill and

encouraged the child to transcend, that is, to relate the meaning to some other thought or experience” (p. 1). Transcendence is the act of taking what is learned in one situation and using it in a new situation. The more knowledgeable individual acts as the expert

learning often involves face-to-face mediation by experts in the life of a child, it can also take place vicariously through interactions with texts in both print and digital

environments. The expert in this case is the author, the computer programmer, or the voice mediating applications within digital devices. The resulting experience is a

transaction between the reader and the text.

Transactional theory. This notion of transaction was advanced by John Dewey (1938) and Louise Rosenblatt (1995) and is known as transactional theory. Dewey (1938) believed that each experience is a transaction between the learner and the environment at that particular moment in time. Louise Rosenblatt (1978) argued that meaning does not reside in the words on the page or within the reader, but rather within the transaction of the reader and the text. Rosenblatt described this as the “poem” (p. 123). Central to her theory was the notion that each reader reads a text in two distinct ways, both efferently (an attempt by the reader to understand the text) and aesthetically (their own unique engagement with the text). This theory stood in stark contrast to the stance of New Criticism, which prevailed through much of the first half of the 20th century, in which meaning resided in the words and teachers were to teach predetermined interpretations with little or no attention to the experiences of the reader. Rosenblatt (1938) posited, “There is no such thing as a generic reader or a generic literary work; there are in reality only the potential millions of individual readers of the potential millions of individual

literary works” (p. 32). Furthermore, Rosenblatt (1986) pointed out that there is a mix of both public and private meaning involved and that the reader shifts between the efferent and aesthetic

stance; while someone else can read a text efferently for us, no one else can evoke the same meaning as that of individual readers.

Additionally, the work of Kenneth Goodman et al. (1986) further extended the theory to examine the way in which the transactions that children have with others change or extend meaning making. These transactions occur in face-to-face encounters through conversations as well as with texts. Whitmore et al. (2005) extended this to include the way that learners transact with others (adults and peers) as well as cultural tools, all of which serve to mediate learning. More recently, this has been extended to include transactions with new technologies as learning is mediated within virtual spaces

(Gee, 2012; Leu, 2012; Marsh, 2005).

Syncretism. Just as children learn within various places and spaces, they also naturally and purposefully combine various ways of knowing within these places. This idea of the natural use of language and the blending of multicultural and multilingual literacy practices in social settings is extended by Gregory, Long and Volk (2004) as they explored the notion of syncreticity, or the ways children transform different cultural practices, languages, and interactions into new spaces. These new spaces allow for the intersecting of practices in ways that support interactions with others. The history of Syncretic Literacy Studies is grounded in the work of anthropologists seeking to explain interactions and changes in religious practices; however, today embodies studies which seek to explain how children blend the uses of various cultural tools and practices (Gregory, et al., 2004). These studies share the basic tenets that children draw on their own unique cultural and linguistic backgrounds and blend, borrow, and apply these tools

Networks of support and communities of practice. An additional key tenant Long & Volk (2004, 2010) explored was the many ways in which learners create spaces within complex networks of support. Wenger and others have termed these networks communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). These networks consist of the members of the family and community within which children live and learn and whom serve to mediate learning through