Literacy, power and practices: taking a discourse-ethnographic approach to exploring adult literacy practices in Pakistan and the UK
The framework for this paper takes its central orientation from the New Literacy Studies (NLS) body of research which focuses on the analysis of texts and practices rather than the skills-oriented perspective of large-scale quantitative studies. In this paper, these are the texts of
everyday life and the literacy practices of adult migrants before and after their migrations. Barton and Hamilton (2000) claim that practices are neither accidental nor random but are given their structure by institutions. This includes social institutions, such as the family, education and
religion, and includes those institutions which are formally structured through rules and procedures, such as schools. The analysis in this paper focuses on the sponsorship of literacy in Pakistan prior to one adult’s migration and the ways in which these literacies are taken up after
migration to the UK. The contribution of this paper to the field of adult literacy is the multi-disciplinary methodological framework it presents for analysing the socio-political influences which shape the accessibility of literacy, accessibility which is taken for granted in large scale
surveys which measure literacy skills. To do this, I combine work using the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Studies (Wodak 2011) with the literacy practices approach set out above to explore how one Mirpuri family deploy their multilingual literacy resources.
Keywords: Adult literacy; Pakistan; critical discourse analysis; ethnography; migration
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Reading, Reading, UK
Publication date: 04 July 2019
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