Discourse and “The New Literacy Studies�?

The new literacy studies (hereafter “NLS�?) is a name that arose “after the fact.�? In the 1980s a number of scholars from different disciplines (see citations below, in the next section) began to critique the traditional view of literacy as “the ability to read and write�? (a largely individual and mental phenomenon) and to argue for a social and cultural approach to literacy. In the late 1980s I referred to this work, in which I was myself engaged, as “the New Literacy Studies�? (Gee, 1989), because I believed that the work shared some common themes and was converging on a new interdisciplinary field of study. The people I included under this label did not necessarily see themselves at the time as being in the same “movement.�? Brian Street, one of the earliest and leading scholars in the NLS, has since done more than anyone to institutionalize the NLS and to get it recognized as a consistent approach to literacy studies (Street, 1997, 2003, 2005).