Markets of English - Joseph Sung-Yul park & Lionel Wee

Park, Joseph Sung-Yul and Lionel Wee. Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World. New York: Routledge, 2012.


Following Bourdieu, the authors take a market theoretical perspective, which is "an analytic stance towards language that focuses on the ideologies and practices that shape and negotiate the value of language varieties as they are perceived in social context" (6).  They identify previous frameworks for critiquing global English: linguistic imperialism & linguistic human rights (both macrosocial approaches), World English (valorizes variety, but not internal heterogeneity), English as a Lingua Franca (core features for mutual intelligibility), and performativity/transculturation (power relations, local & hybrid practices).  The authors find important contributions from all these approaches in looking to factors beyond the linguistic for the global spread of English, but they find the last to be the most sophisticated in its complexity.

In relation to Kachru's three circles model, the authors maintain the "nation" category as a reference point for how ideologies of standard languages manifest power relations, but acknowledge that other levels of society need to be considered as well to recognize heterogeneity within and across groups since "[l]ocal evaluations of linguistic appropriation, which are commonly framed in terms of ideologies of allegiance, competence, or authenticity, etc., make reference to and are thus constrained by the Three Circles as an ideological construct" (70).

Based on Pennycook, the authors outline a performativity approach to critique English's global spread by saying that "identity is not something that precedes the practices that bring them into being, but something that is called into being through the linguistic acts that perform them" (83).    They trace the process of language abstraction that leads from viewing a language as communicative practice to an entity that can be standardized (or recognized according to set standards) and valued hierarchically.  Interestingly, they point out that the conceptualization of language as an entity is usually tied to literacy development and sedentary habits leading to the ideology of language being tied to place.

They also show the results of reconceptualizing language as an unchanging identity feature - with implications for language ownership - to a resource with currency that can be converted as it crosses markets and gets resignified.  What kind of market this is will determine what kind of a currency language will have since autonomous markets may encourage crossing and appropriation while a unified market controlled by an elite core will likely be more essentialistic.  Excesses of the indexical field are opportunities for pointing out underlying ideologies and to promote change.

In order to critique the inequalities created by the neoliberal view of English as a neutral world language, Park and Wee encourage teachers to recover and use a practice-based approach to language that creates changes within the unified market, not just autonomous ones.  They also hold that critique should move beyond the macro-level to the local and individual ones.

Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom - Matsuda et al

Matsuda, Paul Kei, Michelle Cox, Jay Jordan, and Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, eds. Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. New York: Bedford St. Martin's, 2011.

Starting with the 2009 CCCC Statement on Second-Language Writing and Writers, this book is a collection of articles published originally elsewhere to provide a cross section of issues related to SLW within Composition Studies.  Some of the major trends running through the work is that Western cultural individualism, as manifested through expressivism and process writing, can be inappropriate and even colonizing for second language writers.  Teaching writing as a social (and socialized?) activity can be a more effective and rhetorical approach.  Another important strand is seeing second language writers as a heterogeneous group despite institutional discourses that tend to homogenize them.

Paul Kei Matsuda shows how the labor division for writing pedagogy has been historically split between L1 and L2 writing in Composition Studies and ESOL respectively, and Carol Severino calls for more ideological discussions in L2 as has been more the case among L1 practitioners.  Matsuda calls SLW an inherently interdisciplinary and symbiotic field - especially since it doesn't have its own institutional domain - with its maturity marked by metadisciplinary discourse  (32).  A key moment in the history of SLW, which begins in the 1940s US, is the 1980s with contributions from Discourse Studies where pedagogical views and practices take into account that "writing is much more than an orthographic symbolization of speech; it is, most importantly, a purposeful selection and organization of experience," (Arapoff in Matsuda 25).  Tony Silva likewise points out that "ESL writers come, of course, from many different cultures, rhetorical traditions, and linguistic backgrounds and may bring with them distinct strategies for learning and writing" (Silva 160).  These insights connect SLW to outside ideas of transfer and rhetorical attunement.

Guadalupe Valdés takes issue with the uncritical celebration of diversity and multiculturalism that do not recognize or address differing student needs.  She condenses a large body of work on Bilingual Studies to present useful threshold concepts for SLW teachers, which I have pulled out below:

• Bilingualism is a widespread natural phenomenon across time and space that occurs for different reasons (41).
• Depending on the nature of linguistic contact, individuals' productive and receptive abilities can differ across languages (41).
• In terms of biliteracy, literacy skills acquired in one language transfer successfully to another (42).
• Bilinguals can be elective (choice & additive) or circumstantial (survival & subtractice) (43-44).
• Incipient bilingualism occurs during the acquisition period of a second language (48).
• Continued use of learner-like features is called fossilization (functional bilingualism).  This may lead to contact varieties of English with alternative conventions to standard English (51).
• Learning automatic/conventional phrases, collocations, and idiomaticity is complex, which can lead to an idiomatic accent in writing (53-54). 

Most of these concepts can be applied more broadly to multilingualism, not just bilingualism.  Valdés ultimately holds that teaching incipient vs. functional bilinguals demands greater understanding of students' backgrounds and different teaching approaches.  The institutional separation between mainstream students (including basic writers and speakers of nonstandard varieties of English) and ESL students should include functional bilinguals in mainstream programs and incipient bilinguals in ESL compartmentalizations.

Yuet-Sim D. Chiang and Mary Schmida further show that language can be a synonym for culture, and bilingual identity can be a "traditional cultural affiliation with the heritage language," not necessarily a proficiency in the language.  They define literacy as an act of meaning-making, self-definition, and way of engaging with the world and therefore find that categories available for self-identified bilingual students of mainstream, language minority, or ESL speaker are not sufficient for responding to students' complex realities.  They suggest reorienting labels on English "nativeness" to "how primary English fits their literary and linguistic identity" as well as accommodating - beyond acknowledging - race, culture, and ethnicity in "the sociopolitical constructions of English literacy" (108).

Linda Harklau provides a useful term of representation as a partner concept with identity. Whereas identities are "multiple, fragmentary, subject to change" as well as "locally understood, constantly remade in social relationships, " representations are  "images, archetypes, even stereotypes of identity used to label students" and "seemingly static, commonsense categorical perceptions of identity prevalent in particular sociocultural, historical, and institutional settings" (110-113).  In her study of immigrant students across the high school and college transition, Harklau shows how previously successful students failed to mirror teachers' representations of them when those representations did not recognize or meet the needs of their former and developing identities, and their behavior and achievement was therefore interpreted negatively by teachers with consequences for their grades.

In a direct correlation with Harklau, Chiang and Schmida, Awad El Karim M. Ibrahim writes in his ethnography of performance on African immigrant students in Canada that the "social imaginary was directly implicated in how and with whom they identified, which in turn influenced what they linguistically and culturally learned as well as how they learned it" (138).  Using Anderson, he defines the social imaginary as "a discursive space or a representation in which [individuals] are already constructed, imagined, and positioned" and further draws on Foucault to say that "although social subjects may count their desires and choices as their own, these choices are disciplined by the social conditions under which the subjects live" (140).  He talks about antecedent signifiers of identity in previous contexts and the process of re-translating the self to a new setting.

He also shows that in the face of negative societal representations, acts of positive identification also take place over time with both of these processes at the subconscious level.  Performative acts of identification through accessing and learning patterns and codes do not require master and fluency.  He ultimately argues that "What is learned linguistically is not and shot not be dissociable from the political, the social, and the culture. [...] Because language is never neutral, learning it cannot and should not be either. [...] Wittingly or unwittingly, schools sanction certain identities an accept their linguistic norm by doing nothing more than assuming them to be the norm; we as teachers should remember that these identities are reaced, classed, sexualized, and gendered" (151).  At the very least, teachers need to make space and recognize diversity of identities and create opportunities for social critique.

Tony Silva takes up the thread with "On the Ethical Treatment of ESL Writers" by suggesting four ways of respecting ESL writers.  First, they need to be understood as a heterogeneous group with different traditions and strategies they bring to learning and writing along with recognition that revision will probably not be intuitive.  They should also be provided suitable learning contexts in which they can choose mainstream, BW, ESL, or accommodating writing classes based on abilities and preferences.  They should be provided with appropriate instruction in which teachers facilitate, rather than control student writing so that students can choose their own topics and that teachers' own positions shouldn't determine or become the curriculum.  Evaluations should also be fair and recognize that "ESL writers' rhetorical differences may be manifestations of their cultural backgrounds and not cognitive or educational deficiencies" (163).  This points to the importance of teachers adopting a rhetorically attuned manner of evaluating student work.

Vai Ramanathan and Dwight Atkinson draw attention to the "metaphorical notion of voice" and related social practices with the underlying view that "as individuals, we all have essentially private and isolated inner selves, which we give outward expression" (167).  However, they also point out that many people around the world may have conventions based on views that are not so individualistic with such overt and assertive linguistic practices based on the countercultural 1960's and 70's in the US.  Two alternative approaches to "voice" than an expressivism problematic cross-culturally is Ede's "situational voice" related to classical rhetoric and Bakhtin's "heteroglossia" related to social constructionism.  The individualistic focus of voice has implications for how educators approach critical thinking and textual ownership, but they must be viewed relative to the context.

In explaining critical writing, A. Suresh Canagarajah discusses three approaches to teaching SLW.  The first is the conversion approach, which moves students from indigenous to English-based discourses.  The second is the crossing model, which develops the ability of switching discourses based on context.  The third is the negotiation model, which involves creating alternate discourses and literacies.  These three approaches map fairly well onto Horner's identified approaches to teaching literacy.  In terms of English as an imperialistic language, he also says that teachers may adopt a separatist (cynical & deterministic) or universalist (complacent & romantic) orientation.  A third orientation can be using English as "a resource for oppositional and critical purposes" (226).  Some of his main suggestions for what teachers should pass on to students for critical writing are listed below:

• Do not treat communication rules as innocent or indisputable, but negotiate them.
• Treat all knowledge as "interested."
• Explore your identity, consciousness, and values reflexively while constructing texts.
• Interrogate the dominant conception of reality.
• Interrogate language for how it represents its own values and suppresses divergent messages.

In "Should We Invite Students to Write in Home Languages? Complicating the Yes/No Debate," the various contributing authors identify several variables to consider.  These are included below:

• home language or home dialect? 
• kind of writing?
• audience?
• political or psychological context (possible stigmatization/identity)?
• learning goals?
• student/teacher trust?
• language used for writing?
• process - exploratory, final versions (literal translation or global revision)?
• choice of student, teacher, or institution?
• teacher's beliefs/convictions?

Basically, the invitation should be offered with both respect and awareness.

Joy Reid and Barbara Kroll likewise offer a list of characteristics related to writing task design.  Basically, the task should "measure student skills and [...] provide a learning opportunity for the writers" (268).  More specifically, tasks should be contextualized & authentic, accessible in content, engaging, and include appropriate evaluation criteria (269).  Ann Johns promotes a socioliterate approach (SA) with the understanding that texts are socially constructed, rather than autonomous, so that "students acquire a literacy strategy repertoire and develop the confidence that enables them to approach and negotiate a variety of literacy tasks in many environments" (290).  Her approach relates to transfer and genre studies, and the main goals of SA are listed below:

• tap into and apply background knowledge (genre related) for analysis and critique of texts
• revise genre theories (centripetal forces for textual contentions & centrifugal forces for changes)
• engage literacy strategies for approaching tasks (assess, expand, revise)
• examine texts tasks, roles, and contexts
• develop textual metalanguage

Ultimately, Johns advocates for an "outward-looking" class with SA that focuses on context and influences of a text while remembering the "student as a social being" (300).

In terms of evaluation and assessment, Rober E. Land Jr. and Catherine Whitley show that "[NNS readers] can accommodate to more kinds of rhetorical patterns that can NS readers" and propose a pluralistic rhetoric that would "allow [students] to adapt to and value writing that employs varying rhetorical organizations (333).  I would again connect this to Rebecca Lorimer Leonard's
 idea of rhetorical attunement and replace the labels of NNS and NS with readers and writers of translingual or monolingual dispositions.  Land and Whitley show that the ability to suspend judgement (similar to the "let it pass" principle) can allow for recognition of organization different from reader expectations.  They further suggest that Standard Written English features not be automatically added and other features be deleted or modified.

Harkening back to Canagarajah's chapter on orientations to English writing, Carol Severino advises teachers during the feedback process to take different sociopolitical stances at different times for different purposes and contexts, providing a continuum to guide such a practice.

Interestingly, she addresses the choice of researching her own responses to student work by referencing Geertz's opportunity for "thick" description and highlights the interplay between macropolitics and micropolitics in teacher feedback that sends messages about acculturation to students.

As Ramanathan and Atkinson already adressed in regards to textual ownership, Pat Currie draws on Pennycook to show how "plagiarism is ideological" and traces the progress of one university student using plagiarism as a survival strategy.  This relates directly to the idea of "patch writing" as a stage of development as mentioned in the CCCC Statement.  She suggests teaching students ethnographic techniques to understand disciplinary communities, focusing on genres, article introductions, and conceptual activities for examples.  I would also add to this including opportunities for writer authority and expertise in assignment design and prompts.

In the final chapter, Dana Ferris and Barrie Roberts present their research findings on the explicitness of error feedback.  Significant findings include the following:

• no significant differences in editing success between coded feedback and underlined errors
• editing was more successful in "treatable" (patterned) errors than "untreatable" (idiomatic)
• no-feedback students most successfully found and corrected word choice errors

Although they focused on student errors and accuracy, they also include the assumption that students should receive feedback on their ideas and rhetorical strategies.

A Guide to Composition Pedagogies - Gary Tate et al

Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper, Kurt Schick, and H. Brooke Hessler, eds. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

In their introduction, the editors highlight characteristics of pedagogy such as being theoretical, research based, rhetorical, and personal.  Crucially, they identify pedagogy as critically reflective practice and a normalizing and/or revolutionary social force.

In "Basic Writing Pedagogy: Shifting Academic Margins in Hard Times," Deborah Mutnick and Steve Lamos identify five key principles and practices that characterize BW pedagogy.  These include the following:

1. student engagement, rather than "remediation" (intellectual, not skill-and-drill)
2. extra student-centered work (conferences, feedback, scaffolding, etc.)
3. higher-order alongside lower-order issues
4. integrating writing & reading
5. negotiating student incomes with outcomes

They further identify four BW approaches including Error-Centered (Shaughnessy), Academic Initiation (Bartholomae), Critical (Horner, Lu, Gee, Street), and Spatial (Bartholomae).  They ultimately see that "BW has from its inception been a response to political and economic pressures, changing demographics, and local conditions" which can provide diverse access to higher education or perpetuate and reify racial, cultural, and linguistic stereotypes (32).

Contrasting collaboration approaches to a Romantic model (writing as a gift one has or not) of humanistic thought, in "Collaborative Writing, Print to Digital," Krista Kennedy and Rebecca Moore Howard build on Bruffee's three principles (social constructionist) of collaborative learning to show that writing is a social, rather than individual activity. These principles are that thought is internalized conversation, writing is externalizing thoughts or conversation re-externalized, and peer/community context socially justifies knowledge. They later outline strategies for successful collaborative writing projects including delaying collaborative writing, group design instead of redesigning individual tasks, choosing collaboration type (dialogic or hierarchical), student initiation and group autonomy, transparent grading, and preparing for resistance and dissent.  They also recognize that digital networks and media have facilitated new opportunities for collaboration.

In "Critical Pedagogies: Dreaming of Democracy" by Ann George, she works through the challenges in trying to apply Friere's principles to a US higher education institutional setting, but ultimately shows that Burke provides a framework using identification and deflection that can be a more useful pedagogical guide along with stasis theory to drive critical analysis and rhetorically respond to student resistance to leftist politics.  Indeed, the chapter "Cultural Studies and Composition" by Diana George, Tim Lockridge, and John Trimbur trace how CS came from the New Left in the UK in the 1950s and 60s and further how composition has taken on so much of cultural studies as an object of inquiry that it is no longer remarkable to talk of the two separately in cultural studies' relation to composition.  Relatedly, in her chapter on "Feminist Pedagogies," Laura R. Micciche draws on the second-wave feminist assumption (but doesn't stop there) of "the personal is political" (129) to show how teaching and mentoring are forms of professional activism; identities are intersectional; systemic analyses of inequality uncover power, knowledge, and meaning production; writing is a tool for "self revelation, critique, and transformation; and collaboration and alternative classroom arrangements can distribute agency.  All three of these chapters are related to recognizing power, and by extension (rather than explicitly by the authors) discourse analysis.

Chris Burnham and Rebecca Powell define expressive pedagogy as "assigning the highest value to the writer's imaginative, psychological, social and spiritual development and how that development influences individual consciousness and social behavior, [...] employ[ing] freewriting, journal keeping, reflective writing, and small-group dialogic collaborative response to foster a writer's aesthetic, cognitive, and moral development" (113).  Student engagement, empowerment, voice, and inclusivity are underlying values of those who take this approach and although it has been attacked for not being theoretically or rigorous through a body of research, its tenets and practices can be seen in the widely used and accepted process pedagogy.  Chris M. Anson identifies a paradigm shift between current-traditional approaches (pedagogy of transmission and remediation) to process approaches.  The image below outlines key distinctions between the two:

(216)
Pre-writing in process pedagogy, which can take up 85% of writing time, is related to rhetoric's concept of invention.

In "Rhetoric and Argumentation," David Fleming draws attention to two definitions of argument as "a set of propositions consisting of a claim and one or more reasons offered in its behalf" and "a social interaction characterized by disagreement," and reasoning with others is "the process of making an argument in the context of having an argument" (249).  He points out that in classical rhetorics, difference was seen as inevitable, but the audience was not an opponent to be vanquished, but a third party council that would make decisions, which may differ from modern conceptualizations of argumentation.  Isocratean and Aristotelian strands emerged with Isocrates suggesting preparing texts "by anticipating their performance" with a common scheme of introduction (exordium), statement of facts (narratio), division (partitio), proof (confirmatio), refutation (refutatio), and conclusion (peroratio).  Aristotle focused on stages of preparation including invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery with three sources of persuasion in a rhetorical situation including speaker (ethos), subject (logos), and audience (pathos).  He also introduced the rhetorical syllogism, or enthymeme, concerning contingencies and moving towards judgement.  In contemporary rhetorics, some of these concepts have been recovered, and Toulmin introduced the need to identifying warrants that authorize arguments, adding qualifiers and rebuttals into the relationship between evidence and a claim. 

Despite the usefulness of many of these principles, Fleming finds rhetorical approaches to be ill-matched or at least not widely accepted by current cultural and political climates of public argumentation and discourse that are largely non-rational.  Research shows that argumentation may be difficult and late to develop compared to other language development:

• Both orally and written, children produce more words in narrative tasks than argumentative ones.
• A large jump in argument skill takes place between ages 11-15.
• Children tend to view argument as justification, not refutation, even after 12 years of age. 
• Teenagers begin producing counterarguments at 15-17 years of age (259).

It is probably safe to say that argumentation based on the premise of public, rational deliberation is socially and cognitively complex while valuable for both critical inquiry and action.

As he has argued elsewhere, Paul Kei Matsuda is joined by Matthew J. Hammill in the chapter "Second Language Writing Pedagogy" to address monolingual and multilingual norms in composition as assumptions about students (and dominant varieties of English) lead to practices that are less appropriate to the actual diversity of students.  In reference to second language writers, they highlight the difference of experience between international and resident students; different proficiencies in spoken and written modes of English; differing background knowledge and experience based on subject matters, cultural contexts, educational systems, literacy practices, and genre-specific transfer.  Encouraging students to tap into, yet evaluate the appropriateness, of their available linguistic and cultural resources instead of focusing on topics related to dominant student culture and social issues can help with student engagement.  Strategies and resources that can be useful include learner dictionaries, translation, writing centers, and "patchwriting" to scaffold language and help students acculturate to culturally acceptable approaches to plagiarism. 

They distinguish between mistakes as performative and errors as reflections of deviant internalized structures than dominant norms (my emphasis added).  This draws on the idea of interlanguage as a continually evolving mental grammar (assuming mental grammars can also be more fixed, less fluid).  They also draw on Ferris to distinguish rule-governed errors that are treatable and idiosyncratic errors (idiomatic) that are un-treatable.  Regarding negotiating language differences, they offer guiding principles to help students including teaching dominant as well as nondominant language forms and functions, the boundaries between the two, principles and strategies for negotiating discourse, and the risks of using deviational features (277).  It is important to note that this approach, while acknowledging the diversity of student experience, is multilingual, rather than translingual.

In "The Pedagogy of Writing in the Disciplines and Across the Curriculum," Chris Thaiss and Susan McLeod point to the 1970s as the birth of the WAC movement (closely tied to process writing approaches) responding to first generation college students trained more in multiple choice tests than extended writing tasks.  In refining the relationship between WAC and WID, the authors clarify that "where WAC implies the institutional move to have teachers from across fields become involved in helping students learn through writing, WID emphasizes the distinct disciplines, the discursive and rhetorical features that characterize them, research that studies these characteristics, and appropriate genres and writing pedagogies" (284).  Both approaches could be combined productively with Basic Writing's academic induction approach, but the level of critical engagement will probably depend on the teacher and institution.

In her synthesis of "Genre Pedagogies," Amy J. Devitt outlines three broad pedagogical approaches to genre theory/practice including teaching particular genres (explicit teaching), genre awareness (applied analysis), and genre critique (identifying inequalities of access).  From the contributions of each of these, she further demonstrates complementary goals of such approaches for college writing instruction, which are included below:

• students access and control particular genres
• students learn strategies for encountering new genres across medium and context
• students recognize the cultural/ideological nature of genres in order to critically engage with them

To these ends, drawing on Wardle's idea of writing about writing as well as Reiff & Bawarshi's "boundary crossers" and "boundary guarders," metacognition and reflection are key elements for transfering genre knowledge to new situations.  This approach is very inclusive and can be combined productively with WAC/WID, BW, SLW, Rhetorical, and Expressivist approaches to writing pedagogy.

The book overall provides an overview of various approaches and strands of conversation within the pedagogies of composition, seeing these as multiple.  Each chapter has compressed and synthesized an immense amount of scholarship and research, and touches on many concepts that were later configured or represented slightly differently in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies.

Naming What We Know - Linda Adler-Kassner & Elizabeth Wardle

Adler-Kassner, Linda and Elizabeth Wardle, eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016.

This volume collects threshold concepts, rather than learning objectives, related to writing studies, rhetoric, and composition with the meta-concept that writing is an activity and a subject of study. The experts in the field are fundamentally opposed to the idea that writing is a basic, neutral skill for individual expression and inscription to be learned and mastered once for all according to a model of transmission pedagogy. The five other main concepts and subareas are included below for easy reference:

1.0 Writing is a social and rhetorical activity.
1.1 Writing is a knowledge-making activity.
1.2 Writing addresses, invokes, and/or creates audiences.
1.3 Writing expresses and shares meaning to be reconstructed by the reader.
1.4 Words get their meaning from other words.
1.5 Writing mediates activity.
1.6 Writing is not natural.
1.7 Assessing writing shapes contexts and instruction.
1.8 Writing involves making ethical choices.
1.9 Writing is a technology through which writers create and recreate meaning.

2.0 Writing speaks to situations through recognizable forms.
2.1 Writing represents the world, events, ideas, and feelings.
2.2 Genres are enacted by writers and readers.
2.3 Writing is a way of enacting disciplinarity.
2.4 All writing is multimodal.
2.5 All writing is performative.
2.6 Texts get their meaning from other texts.

3.0 Writing enacts and creates identities and ideologies.
3.1 Writing is linked to identity.
3.2 Writers' histories, processes, and identities vary.
3.3 Writing is informed by prior experience.
3.4 Disciplinary and Professional identities are constructed through writing.
3.5 Writing provides a representation of ideologies and identities.

4.0 All writers have more to learn.
4.1 Text is an object outside of oneself that can be improved and developed.
4.2 Failure can be an important part of writing development.
4.3 Learning to write effectively requires different kinds of practice, time, and effort.
4.4 Revision is central to developing writing.
4.5 Assessment is an essential component of learning to write.
4.6 Writing involves the negotiation of language differences.

5.0 Writing is (also always) a cognitive activity.
5.1 Writing is an expression of embodied cognition.
5.2 Metacognition is not cognition.
5.3 Habituated practice can lead to entrenchment.
5.4 Reflection is critical for writers' development.

Literacy, Economy, and Power - Duffy et al

Duffy, John et al, eds. "Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives." Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.

Each chapter of this collection is informed by and in reaction to Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives.  Many of them use Brandt's conception of literacy sponsors as "any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy - and gain advantage by it in some way" (Brandt in Duffy et al 63).  Many of them complicate this definition.

Cushman uses as an example of the editor for the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper to show the complex negotiation processes sponsors take on while Moss and Lyons-Robinson later relate a story of an African American Women's club to show that literacy sponsorship is just one aspect of a sponsor's identity and resources that must be negotiated within and across a social network.  Christoff shows how sponsors can be misrecognized or distributed, decentralized systems when contrasting how Islam has more impact on literacy practices in Zanzibar than the ministry of education there (and despite literacy ideologies of progress and development).  Donehower's example of rural sustainability follows Brandt's idea that literacy is more than understanding a text, but keeping track of perspectives and learning from texts and literacies precisely because of different perspectives.  Prior traces three approaches to phenomenology to show how Brandt's work aligns with a phenomenological sociology for investigating literate practices.Two other chapters are more particularly useful for my own particular research interests, which I will expand in the following paragraphs.

In Horner & Lu's chapter "Toward a Labor Economy of Literacy: Academic Frictions," they contrast three different approaches to literacy, which are included below:

• Foundationalist model: adheres to universal, uniform, and fixed conventions and procedures is necessary and sufficient - pedagogy of transmission with few advocates in literacy & composition fields, but prevalent in mass media and academics in other fields
• Accomodationist model: recognizes a plurality of conventions across languages and disciplines, but remains static with occluded or fixed power relations - the "silo" model of multilingualism and transmission pedagogy come from identifying a set of conventions and accommodating them (for mastery), not overwriting or challenging them
• Translation model: sees "translation as a constant and inevitable feature of language use" (111) as people communicate across difference as a norm - approaches within this model vary including "neutral," discrete code-switching, fetishizing code-meshing, and emergent (with the authors advocating for emergent and all-encompassing view of all literacy practices as acts of translation)

They use the metaphors of "flow" and "friction" within an economic and labor model.  For the first two approaches, difference is seen as a problem that prevents flow while the third takes difference and friction as inevitable processes that contributes to greater understanding.

Selfe & Hawisher pick up Brandt's thread that "what it is to be literate has seemed so shift with nearly every new generation" to describe new research interests and methodologies related to digital affordances (Brandt in Duffy et al 185).  They point out an intimate relationship between learning English and acquisition of digital literacies in and across transnational contexts of the "globalized eduscape" (189, 192).  In their own research, they used feminist theory to decrease distance between the researcher and participants according to ethnographic fiction that scholars can and should control subjects in the modernist approach as their participants expressed their literacy narratives in digital mediums from the position of coauthors and contributed in the interpretation.  They found that literacy narratives were twice encoded because they provided both practices and artifacts as participants engaged in self-translation (194).  Of particular use, they credit additional semiotic information to alphabetic representations of research and coining the term "born-digital text" to refer to a project's content that "cannon be fully or even adequately, rendered by only print on a page" (197).