Yue Li
What is Literacy?
In Gee's
book, he discussed about discourse. Discourse is a way to get educate, absorb
new knowledge and get connect with the world. In the book, discourse is defined
like a social network, Gee claims: “a socially accepted association among ways
of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify
oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’”(P.257).
So discourse is also literacy. For linguist, discourse is a way to show people
how to talk and what to talk, is the art of talking, every act in the discourse
are symbolizing something.
Literacy
can also be separated by two branches: dominant literacy and powerful literacy,
one is acquisition another one is learning. Acquisition is the way that people
study by born ability and the learning process is to study by the normal way
and study the grammar of the language. (Gee, P.261) “Control” means to use, to
function with. Literacy and discourse are mastered through acquisition, not
learning. Time spent on learning and not acquisition is time not well spent if
the goal is mastery in performance. So acquisition is a better way to get
educated. The writer said he has a
reading classes in the school when he was study another language. Acquisition
and learning are both using in the discourse. Acquisition is more like
literacy, it can the control of the secondary language use, and the secondary
language can be control and be noted. But the first language is more like to be
accept. So in the discourse, learning looks more easer to people and it supposed
to be an ability of kids, they will use that ability in the future. Linguist
skills should be learned and acquisition under a good environment.
Gee James. “What is Literacy?” Language and Linguistics in Context. Eds. Harriet Luria, Deborah
Seymour, and Trudy Smoke. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, London 2006.
257-264. Print.
MLA:
James Gee, a scholar of linguistics, describes language as
uniquely personal; describing language-in-use as a “discourse” among multiple
discourses that are taken up by individuals (p.257).
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