New Literacies: A Dual-Level Theory of the Changing Nature of Literacy, Instruction, and Assessment

By Donald J. Leu, Charles K. Kinzer, Julie Coiro, Jill Castek, L. Henry. Theoretical Models and Processes of Literacy, 2017

491 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Literacy as Deixis Today, the nature of literacy has become deictic. This simple idea carries important implications for literacy theory, research, and instruction that our field must begin to address. Deixis is a term used by linguists (Fillmore, 1966; Murphy, 1986; Traut & Kazzazi, 1996) to define words whose meanings change rapidly as their context changes. Tomorrow, for example, is a deictic term; the meaning of “tomorrow” becomes “today” every 24 hours. The meaning of literacy has also become deictic because we live in an age of rapidly changing information and communication technologies, each of which requires new literacies (Leu, 1997, 2000). Thus, to have been literate yesterday, in a world defined primarily by relatively static book technologies, does not ensure that one is fully literate today where we encounter new technologies such as Google docs, Skype, iMovie, Contribute, Basecamp, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, foursquare, Chrome, educational video games, or thousands of mobile apps. To be literate tomorrow will be defined by even newer technologies that have yet to appear and even newer discourses and social practices that will be created to meet future needs. Thus, when we speak of new literacies, we mean that literacy is not just new today; it becomes new every day of our lives. How should we theorize the new literacies that will define our future, when literacy has become deictic? The answer is important because our concept of literacy defines both who we are and who we shall become. But there is a conundrum here.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2080ebccf8c5a9f72b3c3edb8b80bfeff3dc4d64

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Reading on Paper and Digitally: What the Past Decades of Empirical Research Reveal (2017, background): “In those instances, we might assume that these researchers perceived no difference for the processing of text across print and digital mediums—a perception that has been questioned by others (e.g., Coiro, 2011; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Castek, & Henry, 2013).”