Is this a “literacy revolution”?
Hello and welcome to March!
In 2009 I read an article in Wired magazine that reported on the Stanford Study of Writing and I was very struck by this quote from the leader of the study, Dr Andrea Lunsford, who said, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” (Lunsford, 2009 in Thomson)
This impressed me as a very strong statement, so I looked a little closer at the study.
Basically, the team at Stanford followed 190 students for about five years and asked to analyze every piece of writing the students did – in total they analyzed 15,000 pieces of writing. The first finding was that students do a lot of writing – this was not really a surprise – they’re students – they’re supposed to do a lot of writing! But it was the second statistic from the study that really interested me. The students reported that 38% of the writing that they do is NOT for school. Lunsford calls this “life writing” and she includes things here like poetry, posters, blogs, messages, social media updates. This really fascinated me and it really alerted me to the language teaching applications of this study.
Here’s a short video of Dr Lunsford talking about the study (it’s a little dry, but she says some very interesting things).
I don’t know about you, but I’ve usually found that writing is the skill that students are the least overjoyed to practice in the classroom! But this and other studies show that people are writing more and more in their everyday lives, so why aren’t students dying to practice writing in English? Could it be that what we ask learners to write is not the kind of writing they want to and need to do outside of the classroom?
I was also interested in what Lunsford says about young people being good at ‘kairos’ (understanding and switching to different styles of writing) because they need to be. I wonder whether we’re really incorporating this range of styles of writing in the classroom. Writing a Facebook update is quite different from writing an academic essay and they’re both different from writing a blog or sending a WhatsApp message to a friend. She also found that young people feel that good writing is writing that makes something happen and that when they have a real reason to write and the sense of a real audience, they produce better writing.
Is “Write a paragraph describing your home” going to make something happen? If we really are in the midst of a literacy revolution then it seems that this is something that we as language teachers should be taking advantage of. Are we?
References:
Andrea Lunsford – The Stanford Study of Writing (in Clive Thompson The New Literacy, Wired Magazine, Sept 2009)
The Stanford Study of Writing: https://ssw.stanford.edu/
Andrea Lunsford on “The Agenda” with Steve Paikin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIKu_hZT2BM
