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Academic literacies: What have we achieved and where to from here?

Article  in  Journal of Applied Linguistics · September 2008

DOI: 10.1558/japl.v4i1.137

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 jAL (print) issn 1479–7887
Journal of jAL (online) issn 1743–1743
Applied
Linguistics Discussion

Academic literacies – what have we

achieved and where to from here?
Edited transcript of recorded discussion
February 2007

Jan Blommaert, Brian Street and Joan Turner

Chaired by Mary Scott

Mary Scott (MS, as Chair), Jan Blommaert (JB), Brian Street (BS), Joan Turner
(JT)
MS Thank you all for agreeing to participate in this conversation which is
intended for publication in a special edition of the Journal of Applied
Linguistics entitled: New Directions in Academic Literacies Research. My
role is mainly to ask the questions that Theresa Lillis and I have drafted
and which we hope will stimulate interesting responses.

The first question is: What, in your view, has ‘academic literacies’
achieved to date?
JT I think the term has been enormously successful actually. I think it’s
partly to do with a thirst for new theorisations, new terms, and new
interests in the area. It has found a resonance, particularly with EAP
(English for Academic Purposes) practitioners, but perhaps not in
the way the term was intended. A lot of EAP practitioners are using

Affiliations
Jan Blommaert, Institute of Education, London, UK.
Brian Street, Department of Education and Professional Studies, Kings College London, UK.
Joan Turner, Language Studies centre, Goldsmiths University of London, UK.

JAL vol 4.1 2007 137–148 doi : 10.1558/japl.v4i1.137

©2008, equinox publishing LONDON
138 what have we achieved and where to from here?

‘academic literacies’ to mean different text types, different modes of

assessment, like the lab report, the learning diary, the essay, and also
different disciplinary discourses, e.g. science, history, economics, and
so it seems to me that ‘academic literacies’ has taken over from the term
‘English for Specific/Academic Purposes’ which was beginning to take
on those kinds of focus. But I don’t think practitioners see ‘academic
literacies’ predominantly in theoretical terms; more at the practical level
of analysing genres and discourses.
BS One way into the question – ‘What has academic literacies achieved?’ – is
to refer to a class I had this morning with third year BA students. I got
them to do a presentation on the whole issue and I think ‘academic
literacies’ worked for them at two theoretical levels. One level was that
of previous accounts of writing in higher education which have tended
to be embedded in the system, as it were, rather than coming from more
of a researcher angle, so the accounts were judgmental, even pathological
– the study skills view – or narrowly drawn in terms of ‘academic sociali-
sation’. But then there was the theoretical shift to ‘academic literacies’ – a
shift that fits with a more general view of literacy and social practice,
social theory, and of the writing process as embedded in institutional
practices. There was a long discussion in the class about power and
authority and what the issue might be when you get feedback on an
essay from the tutor. You might not be thinking of power and authority;
you might just be thinking: ‘Did I spell this right?’, ‘Have I got it?’, or,
when tutors say ‘structure’ and ‘argument’ – ‘What do they mean?’ That
sort of thing. So what ‘academic literacies’ did was to lift the issues onto
another level and to say, in effect: Well actually the institution requires
certain ways of representing, certain discourses, certain epistemological
framings, certain kinds of stance, and all of that can be characterised
by saying we’re interested in academic literacies. The term allows that
theoretical move, whereas ‘academic socialisation’ or EAP or some of
the other positions didn’t signal that so strongly, so theoretically. And
then, empirically, the academic literacies position has been cited in a lot
of research that’s been done in the field of student writing, as in recent
edited books (e.g. Jones et al., 1999; Lea and Stierer, 2000; Ganobcsik-
Williams, 2006) which work out its possibilities and significance in dif-
ferent circumstances. There’s a lot of good data out there now on what
happens on the ground when we look at student writing or start writing
from this perspective rather than from a more narrowly drawn study
skills, normative, or deficit/ pathological, viewpoint.
JB Just a brief comment. When you look at the best work versus the worst
 j. blommaert, b. street, j. turner & m. scott 139

work in the tradition, the best work has done exactly that; it has de-
naturalised the object and moved it into a field of institutional practices
and regimes of literacy, which I have found very productive. The worst
work, however – let’s not forget there’s a lot of that around –has isolated
a field which is hard to isolate, especially when you see the way literacy
itself is evolving and developing; consider, for example, multimodality,
electronic and virtual literacies. In such work we get an artificial separa-
tion of a number of very specific genres, for instance, that are presented
as self-contained objects of study. I think that’s problematic.
MS Would you like to say a bit more about the ‘self contained objects of
study’, Jan?
JB Well, to some extent this is a feature of every subdiscipline – it starts
selecting a number of target objects and it increases sophistication in
the analysis of these objects. What you have in the worst work is a very
very narrow selection of particular genres, and a relatively dogmatic way
of treating these objects, even leading to rules – prescriptive as well as
descriptive ones. And I don’t find that very productive.

The second question concerns the significance of terminology and

definitions. The question is: What is at stake in the distinction between
academic literacy and academic literacies?
BS For a lot of people at the moment, the term, ‘literacy’, sits with a very
rarefied, if you like, and culturally normative view. UNESCO is trying
to expand that view. In trying to understand ‘literacy’ they talk about a
‘literate environment’, but then immediately the norms come in and a
literate environment is a place where homes have lots of books on the
shelf and parents read to their children, and so the term ‘literate environ-
ment’ defines what is a narrow cultural norm that enables UNESCO to
do an international comparison job. So then we try to say ‘But there are
varieties of literate environment, there are lots of ways people engage in
literacy; and books and parents reading to their kids is only one way’. I
remember writing a piece twenty years ago called `Which Literacies?’
which tried to capture exactly the denaturalising of what people oth-
erwise assume is just one given thing and that all they have to do is
get access to it. So the plural form, literacies, locates literacy practices
in cultural values, in ideologies and in an understanding of the power
relations involved – for instance, in the question of who are producing
the definitions. One of the most powerful aspects of an ideological model
of literacy is having the power to define literacy in the first place because
140 what have we achieved and where to from here?

then you can claim everything else follows from that. The plural form,
‘literacies’, is meant to challenge all that. Applied to academic work it
says: ‘Lets see what happens if we open literacy up in the academy’. Then
we discover that the particular notion of what counts in one subgroup,
such as a discipline, or what fits the administration’s interests or assess-
ment demands, is actually only one literacy amongst many. So a plural
use of literacies encourages everyone, including the participants, like
my students this morning, to reflect on what uses we are making of the
term, what the uses and meanings of academic literacy practices are for
our particular purposes. That is a question you don’t ask if you just use
the singular term, ‘literacy’, and you’re saying: ‘Why are students not
writing properly any more? Send them down to the sin bin and they’ll
fix them’. The plural form, literacies, challenges all that.
JT I’m not sure that it does.
MS Nor am I.
BS OK, it tries to.
JT In the term, ‘academic literacy’, ‘academic’ already modifies ‘literacy’. I
think that that is important, and it is getting away from the autonomous
model of literacy that you have described, Brian, in talking about the
singular form, literacy. I fully agree with all the things you have been say-
ing but I see a problem from the perspective of my situation, which is very
much a matter of dealing with the interface between the institution, the
student and the practitioner trying to help the student develop and reflect
on practice. But you can’t have with the institution this kind of conversa-
tion that we are now having, and I think even academic literacy, the term
I mean, gives other academics or administrators in the institution some
difficulty. One little example. I was trying to promote the term ‘academic
literacy’, initially to say this is something different, it’s not just literacy, it’s
not just the sin bin, or whatever. It’s to do with the context in which we’re
working. We live in a predominantly visual culture and people are coming
to university who don’t have much experience of writing in an academic
way, so academic literacy is something different. But people just didn’t
understand. I had one person call it academic literary, which is ridiculous.
There’s also the power dimension, which for me is that buried in the
notion of academic literacy is a particular view of rationality and the
assumption is that if you’re rational, you can write and if there’s something
wrong with your writing, then there’s something lacking in your thinking,
which means there is something wrong with you. So the deficit model
immediately kicks in. So for me it’s about fighting, or trying to fight (and I
 j. blommaert, b. street, j. turner & m. scott 141

would like to do it theoretically because I don’t think you can empirically)

to move the kinds of work that I’m involved in out of this marginalisation,
to somehow say: ‘This is important and it has a theoretical background
and it can be theorised as well’. And I think a lot of what you are saying
about academic literacies, Brian, can be embodied by ‘academic literacy’.
I like the pluralisation for all sorts of reasons – contemporary theorising
and so on, and getting away from monoliths – but I think we still have
this monolithic rationality – which combines the notion that if you can
think clearly then you must be able almost automatically to transform
that into clear writing, and if you can’t, ‘OK, it’s easy, a quick fix job’. You
know, ‘Run down to the appropriate department and you’ll get it sorted
out’. But it isn’t easy to sort out; it’s a lot of work, and I think the whole
labour of language that’s involved in academic literacy gets left out of
account. It’s seen as something very technical – press this button and off
you go. It’s actually very time consuming. Also, it’s not necessarily a bad
thing to have to work on your writing. If you work and rework something
the writing can be a very creative part of your thinking, can clarify your
thinking, if you like.
BS I think you’re right to raise the theoretical point because part of this is
about explanation. Institutions want explanations. So UNESCO asks:
‘Why don’t all these illiterate and backward people come to the literacy
programmes we provide?’ But all the explanations so far have failed,
such as that the people are stupid, backward, ignorant, unmotivated,
or the course is inadequate … and none of these explanations seem to
work so there is a space there for saying: ‘Maybe we haven’t conceptu-
alised literacy properly’. The phrase ‘functional literacy’ didn’t do the
job of opening literacy up to conceptual analysis, and so policy based
on this inadequate concept has failed. And somewhere in the middle
of that discussion someone is saying: ‘Right, we’ve had enough of these
academics now, let’s get on with practice’. But, actually, unless you get
that conceptual clarity which I think academic literacies can begin to
develop, then practice doesn’t achieve its aims. The term isn’t itself per-
fect, but it’s a way of opening up a way of thinking.
JB And I would say whatever the term is the big issue is to understand
that when we talk about academic literacy or literacies we are thinking
about a seriously stratified object, a very hierarchical literacy context
which to some extent is reflected by the label ‘academic’. The institutional
environment imposes a stratification and, as a consequence, organises
inequality, not just difference, and my concern would be to keep an eye
on the ball – whether there is diversity or not, we must realise that we are
142 what have we achieved and where to from here?

addressing a very stratified form of literacy. I tend to focus very strongly

on the academic rather than the literacy part, because ‘academic’ pro-
vides you with a clue to understand why particular forms of inequality
can be heavily articulated in an academic environment whereas there
is a lot more openness elsewhere. It explains the rigour that comes with
literacy in an academic environment.

The third question concerns the approach to research. Why is

ethnography so important to the study of academic literacy/literacies?
JB I think there are two main advantages, the first one is that in ethnog-
raphy, or an ethnographic approach to anything, you tend not to take
much for granted. So in other words, literacy is the outcome of research
and not the point of departure. You go out and at the end of the day
come back with a sort of emic, insider’s definition of what literacy is, or
what qualifies as literacy for the particular members of the community.
That is an old established ethnographic principle. The second advantage
is that ethnography chops up every object in microscopic parts that
are very often extraordinarily relevant for understanding the dynamics
of the social value of these practices. The example I always give to my
students is crossing a street. We have one expression which denotes that
particular practice: ‘I cross the street’. Now, if you would be forced to
describe everything you do while performing that very mundane act, it
would take you hours. You would be describing the bodily, the physical,
activities as well as the mental ones, the decisions you make, the calcula-
tions you make of the speed of the vehicle coming and so on and so on.
The same with literacy; we have just one word for something which we
now know is of enormous complexity. The advantage of ethnography is
that it starts delving into the constituent parts, including, for instance,
the material circumstances under which literacy is being practised, the
particular micro-contextual, as well as macro-contextual, environment
in which it occurs and from which it derives meaning. And in that sense,
what ethnography offers you is a very very deep understanding of the
things that really matter. Very often differences are invisible or at least
not visible when you only use the established frames and descriptive
categories, like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ writing. Very often that’s not enough as
an explanation and you need to go into the details of the actual devel-
opment of particular practices in a community, in a given context, in
order to understand what is wrong there. And so ethnography offers
you diagnostically, as well as in terms of remedy, an extremely fine and
an extremely sensitive instrument of identification.
 j. blommaert, b. street, j. turner & m. scott 143

BS And I could pick that up and cite a recent paper of Jan’s, which I was
using today in a class to talk about exactly this issue (Blommaert 2006).
In the paper Jan says that what ethnography does is more than just
provide a description of what you see in front of your eyes. It offers an
epistemological stance that enables you to see the relationship between
what’s there in front of you and larger patterns. So we tried this out with
the students. We said: ‘Here you are doing academic literacy in a course
in a university, but if all you did was observe the immediate situation –
the bits of paper and the pens and some talk – you would miss what an
‘ethnography-as-epistemology’ perspective can give you; what’s actually
constraining you in understanding the situation before your eyes is what
is not before your eyes. These students are doing a degree, so where are
the regulations? They’re going to have to take exams, so they’re going to
have to write in a particular genre, and there will be dates, timetables,
documentations of various kinds. But we’re not sitting here with all of
that in front of us. In the class I cited a university which puts so much
pressure on tutors that they can’t give feedback on the students’ writ-
ing during the course. They give it after the exams, at which point the
students say: ‘Who needs this, it’s too late now.’ The timing of feedback
relates to institutional pressures. But we don’t always see such pressures.
And, again, we’re sitting around a table talking, writing little notes, and
how that relates to these bigger institutional issues is something that
ethnography is particularly good at. Another example we used today
concerns genre and mode switching to come back to Jan’s modes. We
can sit and talk, but then we take some notes, then we turn those notes
into an overhead to present to people, and then we say: ‘Let’s write this
up’, and each of those are – call it a genre at the moment – each of those
actually has quite different linguistic and modality features. But teachers
will often say to students: ‘OK, we’ve had the discussion, now write it
down’, as though it were straightforward; just a matter of dumping it on
the page, whereas actually being conscious of each level and mode is
crucial. I think an ethnographic account combines a linguistic, and now
multimodal, sensitivity so we can understand the levels and processes
in ways that just a description of the event wouldn’t ever capture.
JT I think a lot of the research that has been done ethnographically on
academic literacy is actually quite useful pedagogically.  It’s useful to
show extracts from that kind of research to students who are unfamiliar
with academic culture, and who may be having problems with academic
writing.  Often it’s a case for them of not wanting to write in a way that
they don’t speak.  They don’t want to write in a voice that’s unfamiliar
to them. For example, you often hear students saying they don’t want to
144 what have we achieved and where to from here?

‘talk posh’.  So, if you let them read some of the voices of students who
are feeling very much what they’re feeling, it’s helpful for them. They
find they’re not alone, and it helps them, I think, to understand that
learning in the academic context is to some extent a defamiliarising
process, and that they can learn to speak with a somewhat different
voice, because that’s what learning’s about – extending their range. I also
think that the fact that their kind of experience is being researched also
makes them feel more valued.  So I think the fact that there are relevant
ethnographic studies out there is really very good and we can draw on
them in different ways.
BS I agree with that. At the moment there are both fully fledged books,
e.g. Theresa Lillis’ (Lillis, 2001) and edited books, e.g. the one edited by
Ganobcsik Williams (2006). There’s lots and lots of detail that links the
particular with more general principles and that’s where ethnography
works I think. It does the links.
JB Yes, exactly. And it’s something you’ve brought out also, Brian. I think if
you look at literacy from an ethnographic perspective it is never autono-
mous. For instance, in an academic environment it occurs as a sequence.
It’s always an element in a sequence with hearing and listening, reading,
speaking in a variety of modes and genres, and then there’s writing in
a variety of modes and genres. And all of it coheres, all of it belongs
together, and, in fact, when we give feedback on written work it is very
often: ‘You have to read more on this’, or ‘you have to read this’ or ‘we
need to talk about this’. It is one of the advantages of ethnography, as
I said before, that it doesn’t accept any a priori about the object – for
instance, about the autonomy of the object.
BS And that’s where we might make the link right back to the beginning of
your comment that one of the dangers of reifying the notion of academic
literacy is that it looks as if it’s all about print, whereas, actually, ‘mode
switching’ brings out the fact that, for instance, an overhead projector
slide is actually about layout and that meanings are often contained in
the sequences. One of the big phrases tutors use is ‘structure and argu-
ment’, and no one knows what they mean. Looking at overheads you
could say that sometimes the argument is in the structure because this is
above that and there’s an arrow indicating your claim that the item above
is linked to the item below. But where’re the words? No, it’s all done by
arrows and positioning. We can help students to be aware of that.
 j. blommaert, b. street, j. turner & m. scott 145

The final question concerns a much talked about phenomenon: What

are the challenges in academic literacies in relation to globalisation/
internationalisation?
JB Maybe two things. But they belong together. I think more and more we
need to be concerned about the way in which globalisation emphasises
existing inequalities or creates new ones. I think that the field of academic
literacy is particularly vulnerable to that. Consider the way in which
we now incorporate IT in our academic literacy as a default thing. All
our students are computer literate. Indeed it is a prerequisite. The same
applies to us. We should not forget that in the context of globalisation
developments in what we could call the centre of the world-system have
an effect on things elsewhere, in the periphery of the world-system…
For instance, the way in which, for the moment, our children, even at a
very very young age, are introduced to literacy as writing on a compu-
ter keyboard creates a widening gap in terms of basic literacy capacity
between our society and societies in the periphery, where handwriting
skills remain the default level of achievement. I think this is a growing
concern for those who worry about equality and equal opportunities in
the world. That’s one thing. The second point, and it automatically fol-
lows from that, is that in my view, we need more ethnography because we
need to start looking into the particular situated ways in which literacy
is being organised in societies – micro communities as well as macro
communities, in a state as well as the communities within a state and
across states – in order to understand precisely the dynamics of language
and literacy that we are now witnessing and which we call globalisation.
We won’t get there by using sweeping generalisations and categorical a
prioris. We will have to go out and start investigating the way in which
all of these resources are effectively distributed in societies, are lodged
in particular institutions, in particular communities, and have meaning
to particular people. Unless we do that we are overlooking the danger
of increasing inequality. And it brings me back to one of the things I
said earlier, the tendency in the context of globalisation towards more
inequality. One of the reasons for that is a growing emphasis on uniform-
ity, and in our societies on the standardisation of literacy. We’re going
back to that sort of analytic stereotyping that I mentioned before. The
more we narrow the field of academic literacy to just a handful of highly
standardised and highly codified genres, the bigger the danger, I feel,
that we are missing the point in the context of globalisation.
146 what have we achieved and where to from here?

BS To take that further. I’ve been working in Pakistan recently at the Aga
Khan University in the Institute of Educational Development. They want
to expand their doctoral programme for research students so the students
stay there rather than fly away but there aren’t many people around who
have skills in supervising doctoral students, so my role was a supporting
and mentoring one and we discussed exactly the literature we’ve been
discussing today. One level of support reflected the study skills approach
that says: ‘Send students to have their language fixed because it must
be their language that’s the problem, it must be language interference,
they’re mostly Urdu speakers and then they come to English’. But adding
the academic literacies perspective suggests that maybe there are other
ways of approaching the support that students – and also tutors – might
need. So you take that as a piece of data and then you can relativise the
dominant model that they are receiving, and provide support in-house
rather than people having to fly off to the old centre, if you like, from the
periphery. But then the question you might ask is: ‘Don’t you still have
somebody from the old centre going out doing the mentoring? What
work is that doing? Is that simply reproducing the dominant again?’
How one might unpack that is currently open to question. So part of the
issue about the local and the global might be that while we can signal the
issues and approaches, we are not necessarily sure how they will work.
But they are certainly not going to work if we all say we mustn’t speak to
each other, which would appear to be one outcome of saying: ‘You can’t
as a white male English professor fly off to Pakistan, because that’s all
very colonial’. To which the expected reply is, ‘All right then. I won’t go’.
So then the key issue is: how do we recognise other, diverse ways of doing
things? Maybe there is some way of having synergy in the conversation
so that it doesn’t become local versus global or centre versus periphery
but a new kind of synergy. This seems to be one of the key issues. I
think Lillis and Curry’s work (2004, 2006a and 2006b) with academics
in Europe who are sending articles in their second language, English, to
be published in international journals has the same ring about it. And
then there is ‘World Englishes’, or what one of my colleagues calls EIL,
English as an International Language. This is quite different from saying
we’re going to impose the language variety of this little island on the rest
of the world; rather it says that our variety is one amongst many, just
like the academic literacies point, which is that here we have one variety
amongst many. So I think there are a lot of those kinds of avenues to
be pursued in the global context, building on what we know, and then
listening to what local people have to tell us.
JT I think the language point is that English is the dominant language. That
creates the challenge. How tolerant will we become of other Englishes?
 j. blommaert, b. street, j. turner & m. scott 147

BS Other Englishes, yes.

JT Or even how tolerant are publishers’ views of ‘our’ Englishes, or, if you’re
doing a PhD at an institution here, how tolerant are we of other Englishes
or English as an international language? I’ve got a PhD student doing
her PhD on English as an international language in Japan. I’m very wary
of talking to her about her language but I did broach it the other week
and it is an issue. She needs to work on her English for the PhD which
she’s doing here; she’s not doing it at a university in Japan. So I suppose
it comes back to questions of evaluation and notions of good writing and
writtenness. And particularly at PhD level I think there is this notion
of the writtenness of the PhD, which I think is very much there in the
humanities and social sciences
JB What we see is a growing monopoly of English, or a particular variety
of English, as a commodity. The publishing market itself is becoming
monopolised, and on a global scale. It’s now a worldwide economy, and
the more we see this homogenisation or monopoly, the more we will see
problems with the exchangeability of different forms of academic lit-
eracy. What would qualify as a good, or even excellent, standard for writ-
ing a dissertation in Zimbabwe might not even qualify for an entrance
exam here in London. That’s a danger that we are now facing, more and
more: standardisation organised around forces that are nonacademic,
that are basically commercial and imposed on a worldwide academic
community, creating all sorts of effects elsewhere in the world, in the
sense that you might be very very good academically in the periphery
of the world-system and not even qualify as an academic tout court in
the centre of the world-system.
BS And the other institutions that do that commercially are the language
institutions ranging from the British Council to assessment tests like the
IELTS, all of that, the panoply of the industry in production of a certain
variety of English.
JB Of course English and a particular type of literacy go hand in hand,
and that’s the sort of international standardisation that we now see and
we see it all over the world. ‘International journal’ is synonymous with
English-medium journals. So you get a monopolisation which increases,
and is also institutionally sanctioned through the RAE 2 and equivalent
exercises elsewhere in the world, league tables and the international
reputation of particular places. The risk in this is that we are excluding
more and more people who intellectually would easily qualify as lead-
ing scholars but have to overcome the obstacle of a particular English
literacy standard.
 148 what have we achieved and where to from here?

BS So where are the spaces for challenging that dominant hegemony? Maybe
that is one of the questions we have to ask about the globalisation process.
MS And a related question is: what might ‘challenging’ involve? I can see that
this conversation has brought us face-to-face with the need to continue
to question current orthodoxies including, and perhaps especially, the
criteria and concepts we use as teachers and/or researchers in assessing/
analysing students’ writing. To adapt one of Jan’s (2005) phrases, we need
to consider the places in which and from which students, teachers and
researchers speak and write.
JB We’ve covered quite a bit of ground in forty-five minutes! Good thing
to get three heads, four heads, talking. Fascinating.
MS Thank you, thank you all very much indeed.

Notes
1 This is the edited transcript of a recorded discussion at the Institute of Edu-
cation London on 20th February, 2007.
2 For official details about the UK’s RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) see
http://www.rae.ac.uk/

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