Reflections on Egan-Robertson & Willett (and Heath too, sort of)

On Egan-Robertson & Willett (1998):

For some reason, many articles I read on sociolinguistic topics always bring me back to one of my first graduate lessons in linguistics. Specifically, on p. 11 of this article, we read “This research [within ethnography of communication] has led to studies that have helped explicate how miscommunication may occur when people from different cultural groups interact”. This - and numerous other readings so far in this course - call to mind the SPEAKING model (Hymes, 1962, I think) of “doing” ethnography of communication. The “N” of this model relates to norms - norms of interaction and norms of interpretation, and how these may differ among the participants engaged in the communication. To summarize Hymes, norms of interaction involve rules for how people should interact in a particular situation, and norms of interpretation involve determining what particular communicative (though not necessarily verbal) practices mean within those different interactions.

I also find the ongoing distinction between education and schooling (p. 15, among other citations in this week’s reading) to be an important one, especially for those of us professionally engaged in (or planning to engage in) the former. This distinction is especially relevant when considering Heath’s work on community literacy as well as her highlighting the importance of studying home literacy as a way to augment and clarify issues of school-based literacy. Egan-Robertson and Willett pose a potential question for ethnographic research on page 16: “How might children be able to employ the cultural knowledge they have from their community and family in the classroom” - and I would extend that as a question that is also relevant to studying literacy and language learning in the adult population as well.

Spurred both from past readings of Heath and from revisiting some issues in this article, I am perhaps most interested (dissertation-wise) so far in something that comes up on page 21; the authors identify literacy practices as being related to some “taken-for-granted assumptions about educability, how people learn to read and write, what reading and writing mean to people, how reading an writing fit into people’s lives, and what people use reading writing for”. I work full-time in a Learning Center, where I supervise numerous student workers and tutor numerous language learners each semester (and sometimes students find themselves as members of both categories); over the course of my employment I have come to work with a number of multilingual women educated in Soviet-era Armenia (among many other people). I have done some past projects for classes that have involved interviewing language learners about learning to read, and I would like to continue those explorations in a larger-scale study of literacy practices among these women. I look forward to reading the references identified in this article that relate to literacy practices - and if anyone has any additional suggestions, please do tell!