Critical issues: Reading and the new literacy studies: Reframing the National Academy of Sciences report on reading

Gee, James Paul

This article is a reflection on the recent report from the National Academy of Sciences, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. This report, typical of many recent discussions of early reading instruction, centers on psycholinguistic aspects of reading having to do with phonological awareness, decoding word recognition, and literal comprehension. l seek to reframe the report from the perspective of the New Literacy Studies, an interdisciplinary effort that takes a sociocultural approach to language and literacy. My approach is to stress tensions internal to the report itself as pressure points around which one could imagine a different sort of report being written, one more in the spirit of the New Literacy Studies. l take up issues such as whether or not there is a consensus in the reading field; the nature of the "literacy crisis"; relationships among reading, poverty, racism, and culture; whether or not technology leads to higher literacy demands; learning to read as against learning content; and the connections among phonological awareness, early language abilities, and the use of specific genres and registers in school.

OVER THE LAST FEW DECADES, Work stemming from a variety of dif ferent disciplines has begun to coalesce in a framework now sometimes called the "New Literacy Studies" (for overviews, see Barton,1994; Gee, 1996; Street, 1995; for classic early work, see Heath,1983; Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Street,1984). The New Literacy Studies approach literacy as part and parcel of, and inextricable from, specific social, cultural, institutional, and political practices. Thus, literacy is, in a sense, "multiple": literary becomes different"literacies;' as reading and writing are differently and distinctively shaped and transformed inside different sociocultural practices. Additionally, these sociocultural practices always have inherent and value-laden, but often different, implications about what count as "acceptable" identities, actions, and ways of knowing. They are, in this sense, deeply "political." Furthermore, these practices always fully integrate language, both oral and written, with nonlanguage "stuff," that is, with ways of acting, interacting, feeling, valuing, thinking, and believing, as well as with various sorts of nonverbal symbols, sites, tools, objects, and technologies. Thus, the New Literacy Studies seek, as well, always to study literacy and literacy learning as they are integrated with oral language, social activities, material settings, and distinctively cultural forms of thinking, knowing, valuing, and believing.

I want, in this article, to reflect on the recent report of the National Academy of Sciences on reading (Snow, Burns, & Griffin,1998). I want not so much to critique the report as to reframe it from the perspective of the New Literacy Studies. My approach is to stress tensions internal to the report itself. These tensions are the pressure points along which, I would argue, a different report, one more in the spirit of the New Literacy Studies, could have been imagined (even using the same research material as that surveyed in the report itself).

Debates over reading are now as much the concern of the media and politicians as they are of academics and teachers. It says much about these public debates, however, that volumes published by experts in reading contradict each other as to whether or not there is a consensus in the field. For example, the preface to the National Academy of Sciences report claims that there is now "peace" and consensus in the reading field: The study reported in this volume was undertaken with the assumption that empirical work in the field of reading had advanced sufficiently to allow substantial agreed-upon results and conclusions that could form a basis for breaching the differences among the warring parties. The process of doing the study revealed the correctness of the assumption that this has been an appropriate time to undertake a synthesis of the research on early reading development. The knowledge base is now large enough that the controversies that have dominated discussions of reading development and reading instruction have given way to a widely honored pax lectura, the conditions of which include a shared focus on the needs and rights of all children to learn to read. (pp. v-vi)

The Academy report appeared at the same time as a volume (Osborn & Lehr,1998) from a conference attended by an equally renowned group of experts, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Reading, with the support of the Carus, the Ball, the Johnson, and the McDougal Foundations. The introduction to this volume claims that there is, in fact, no "peace" and little consensus in the reading field:

[The] ... hope was that the conference would help to end the confusion over the ways and means of teaching reading and writing and, thus, to lay the foundation for a.national agenda that educators, schools, and states might use to make reasoned decisions about instruction....

So the conference proved to be a microcosm of the entire field, revealing a fair amount of conflict and some confusion. That the conference was unable to fulfill the hopes that we had for it prompts this warning: A field divided into warring camps is not a profession.

An agreed-upon body of knowledge is typical of and I will go further and say, essential to a true profession. Although an enormous amount of writing and research has focused on various aspects of reading, it is sad to have to acknowledge that this work has not coalesced into an agreed-upon body of knowledge about the content or form of reading instruction, particularly beginning reading instruction. (Richard Andersen's Introduction to Osborn & Lehr,1998, pp. 2-3)

What can we make of a situation in which an official report to the government claims consensus and confidence at the same time that a volume funded by foundations claims no such consensus and displays little confidence? In fact, the situation is worse than such contradictions might indicate, with potentially serious consequences for children in our schools. The reading debates are interminable and inconclusive, I believe, because they frame the issues and problems too narrowly in terms of "reading," construed as what the Academy report calls "real reading," that is, decoding, word recognition, and comprehension of "literal meaning," rather than in terms of language, literacy, and learning as they are situated within multiple sociocultural practices in and out of schools. If we do not begin to transform debates about reading into debates about language, literacy, and learning (which, of course, greatly broadens the relevant research base), then, I predict, we will soon face another and new "crisis": elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms will be filled with children who have successfully passed basic reading tests by the third grade and yet cannot use language (oral or written) to learn, to master content, to work in the new economy, or to think critically about social and political affairs.

Ironically, one can argue for a wider "literacy and learning" viewpoint, rather than a narrower "reading" one, by a close study of the Academy report itself, despite its often narrow focus on the "skills" of"real reading" At the same time, an approach that seeks to uncover an alternative perspective within the report itself will allow me to introduce a New Literacy Studies viewpoint on reading, a viewpoint that disavows dichotomies between, and debates over, phonics and whole language. It disavows these not by "blending" the two, but by disavowing both of them as they are construed in the current reading debates. The New Literacy Studies argue for a focus not on reading, but, rather, on oral and written language as composed of diverse, but closely interrelated "tools" (mediating devices, Wertsch,1998) for learning, development, and activity within concrete social practices at specific, socioculturally diverse sites like schools, homes, communities, and workplaces.

What's the Crisis?

So, let us take a closer look at the Academy report. From the start, the report makes clear (what is widely known, in any case) that, despite the raging debates over reading in our schools, there is, in fact, no "reading crisis" in the United States:

.. . average reading achievement has not changed markedly over the last 20 years [NAEP, 1997). And following a gain by black children from 1970 to 1980, the White-Black gap has remained roughly constant for the last i6 years....

Americans do very well in international comparisons of reading - much better, comparatively speaking, than they do on math or science. In a 1992 study comparing reading skill levels among 9-year-olds in 18 Western nations, u.s. students scored among the highest levels and were second only to students in Finland ... [Elley 1992]. (Snow et al.,1998, pp. 97-98)

Although, I am skeptical of the research that purports to show u.s. students are, by international comparisons, poor in math and science (Berliner & Biddle,1995), those who place more faith in such comparisons than I do ought, indeed, to worry about a school system that produces lots of people who can read (in the sense of passing reading tests) and yet not learn math and science. They ought to worry, too, about a reading report that speaks only to the first issue (reading so as to pass basic reading tests by third grade) and not, in any substantive way, to the latter issue (being able to learn).

The Academy report is well aware that, in the United States, poor readers are concentrated "in certain ethnic groups and in poor, urban neighborhoods and rural towns" (p. 98), a population that is now often labeled "at risk." The above passage gestures to an issue that the report never really faces. For some time, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the BlackWhite gap (and that between several other minority groups and Whites), in both IQ test scores and other sorts of test scores, was fast closing (Jencks & Phillips,1998; Neisser,1998). Some of this heartening progress, especially in regard to achievement tests, ceased in the 1980s. A report that was genuinely interested in increasing the reading scores of at-risk children would ask what factors had been closing the Black-White gap, and why they ceased to operate.

Clearly, the factors that had been closing the Black-White gap were, whatever else they were, powerful "reading interventions," because they significantly increased, the reading scores of at-risk children. Though no one yet knows definitively why the Black-White gap was closing (Jencks & Phillips,1998; Neisser,1998), the factors responsible were, in all likelihood, closely connected to the sorts of social programs (stemming originally from Johnson's War on Poverty) that were dismantled in the 1980s and 1990s (Grissmer, Flanagan, & Williamson,1998). An approach, like that of the Academy, that sees the key issue as "real reading" is not liable to see such social programs as central to a report on reading. Furthermore, a report written to and for the government, in our current political climate, is not liable to advocate for the return of such social programs as a key answer to the "literacy crisis.

On the other hand, an approach like that of the New Literacy Studies, which sees literacy as integrally part and parcel of sociocultural practices (caught up with mind, body, and soul, as much as language), will see social programs that ameliorate injustice and support healthy cultural variation as very much part of the field of"literacy" The issue here is not support for any specific social program (though we do know several that work; for example, improved nutrition; cognitively challenging "early start" interventions; smaller class sizes; more competent teachers; respect for, and building on, diverse cultural skills and knowledge; allowing "non-mainstream" families to accrue and pass down "cultural capital" for three generations or more by programs like affirmative action - see, for example, Darling-Hammond,1997; Grissmer et al.,1998; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Meier,1995; Miller,1995). Rather, the issue is that, if one accepts the New Literacy Studies approach, one cannot coherently debate ways of improving reading and leave out social, cultural, institutional, and political issues and interventions as if they were "separate" from literacy (mere"background noise;' as it were). The formerly closing, and now static, Black-White gap shows they most certainly are no such thing. Some of these issues are touched on in the report, but they are, by no means, central to it.

There is also the issue of power and racism, a matter not touched at all in the report. Some people believe that bringing up such issues is merely "political" or, at the very least, not directly relevant to reading. But this is simply not true. The fact that children will not identify with, or even will disidentify with, teachers and schools that they perceive as hostile, alien, or oppressive to their home-based identities and cultures is as much a cognitive as a political point (Holland & Quinn,1987). Claude Steele's (Steele, 1992; Steele & Aronson,1995,1998) groundbreaking work clearly demonstrates that in contexts where issues of race, racism, and stereotypes are triggered the performance of even quite adept learners seriously deteriorates (see Ferguson,1998, for an important extension of Steele's work). To ignore these wider issues, while stressing such things as phonemic awareness built on controlled texts, is to ignore, not merely what we know about politics, but what we know about learning and literacy as well. To take just one example from many possible examples, the large literature on "sharing time" in the early years of school (Cazden, 1988; Champion, 1997 Gee,1985; Michaels,1981,1985; Michaels & Collins,1984; Michaels & Foster,1985), which in many schools is early oral training for literate language, amply demonstrates that culture and identity are integral to success or failure at learning school-based forms of literate language.

The Academy report is also aware that the category of poor children at risk for reading failure works very differently at an individual level than it does at a group level: "A low-SES child in a generally moderate or higher-- SES school or community is far less at risk than an entire school or come munity of low-sES children" (p. 30). Although the report certainly does not stress the matter, it does nothing to hide the fact that ceasing to pool poor children in poor schools (and placing them, not in merely desegregated schools, but in good schools with highly qualified teachers) might do as much or more for reading scores than any instructional intervention the report does discuss (see, for example, pp. 30-31, 98,119,126-127). Indeed, the report admits (though draws no interesting inferences from this fact) that high levels of poverty in a school are a better predictor of children who will have reading problems than is a lack of early phonemic awareness, an issue to which the report devotes a great deal of space (p. 119). Perhaps paradoxically, however, all this is, even within the reading field, old news. These facts simply follow from the more general fact that family, community, and school factors beyond instructional methods contribute more to school failure or success than do specific methods (however efficacious some of them may otherwise be), a fact that has been known for nearly three decades (see Pearson,1997, and the accompanying articles in the recent reprinting of the famous "first-grade studies" from 25 years ago). And, yet, the report sees the debate over instructional methods as the heart of the matter.

The New Literacy Studies would argue that a debate over instructional methods, if it is to be fruitful, must be framed within the larger context of how multiple, school-based literacy practices interrelate with issues of social practice, culture, and power within schools, homes, communities, workplaces, and society at large. This is, again, not (just), as many people think, a political claim. It is an empirical point: instructional methods (just like literacy itself and technologies like computers) do not work or fail as decontextualized generic practices. They have effects only in, and in relationship to, specific social and cultural contexts as they recruit different forms of cognition, and they have different effects in different contexts. This is, indeed, the burden of a great deal of research in recent work in cognitive science on socially situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Dugid,1989; Clark,1997; Engestrom, 1990; Hutchins,1995; Wertsch,1998). The Academy report, however, rarely contextualizes its discussion of methods within specific historical, social, cultural, or political contexts or in the context of diverse school-based practices (more on this below).

Because the Academy panel is well aware that reading levels are not falling among the vast majority of the student population, they must characterize the "reading crisis" they are addressing (and the public is debating) in different terms. One might have thought, in light of our previous discussion, that they would have defined the real crisis as the increasing gap between the rich and poor in our global economy But, in fact, they define the "real" crisis as the fact that demands for high-level literacy skills have increased in our technologically driven society:

Of course, most children learn to read fairly well. In this report, we are most concerned with the large numbers of children in America whose educational careers are imperiled because they do not read well enough to ensure understanding and to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive economy. Current difficulties in reading largely originate from rising demands for literacy not from declining absolute levels of literary. In a technological society, the demands for higher literacy are ever increasing, creating more grievous consequences for those who fall short. (p.1)

Although this is a common argument today, it ignores the fact that modern science and technology create many jobs in which literacy demands go down, not up, thanks to human skills being replaced by computers and other sorts of technological devices (Aronowitz & DiFazio, 1994; Carnoy, Castells, Cohen, & Cardoso,1993; Mishel & Teixeira, 1991). This is true not just for service-sector jobs, but also for many higher status jobs in areas like engineering and bioscience. Indeed, there is much controversy today as to which category is larger: jobs where science and technology have increased literacy demands or those where they have decreased them. The current business literature, rooted in our new global, high-tech capitalism, is full of discussion about the growing danger that an emerging hoard of poorly paid and technologically deskilled service workers will constitute, in developed societies, a new underclass (e.g., Drucker, 1993; see also Gee, Hull, & Lankshear,1996). It seems deeply problematic, then, to demand high-level literacy skills for everyone with no discussion, relevant to teachers, administrators, and students, of the wider social and political contexts in which this demand is being made.

Of course, the members of the Academy panel might well say that this is simply not a matter relevant to the field of "reading." The New Literacy Studies would say it is. Students do not master any school practice without being motivated to enter into and identify with that practice and without believing that they will be able to function within it and use it fruitfully now or in later life. For students who live in a social world far more complex than the Academy report would indicate, questions of identity, motivation, and ability to function are central for learning and literacy (Davidson, 1996; Gee & Crawford,1998; Mahiri,1998). In the end, too, by placing into the background these social, institutional, and political realities - by decontextualizing reading from them - the report cannot tell the truth about the world in which it seeks to intervene.

Phonemic Awareness and the "Fourth-Grade Slump"

Although the Academy report covers a lot of ground, it centers around and constantly returns to one basic research finding, that is, the strong correlation between early phonological awareness and later success in learning to read: "even prior to formal reading instruction, the performance of kindergartners on tests of phonological awareness is a strong predictor of their future reading achievement" (p. 54). This correlation, together with studies that demonstrate that direct and systematic instruction in phonics is superior to less direct and less systematic phonics instruction, leads the writers of the report to concentrate heavily (along with many other recent reports and volumes on reading) on phonological awareness, phonics instruction, decoding, and word recognition in the early grades. Such matters (and closely related ones) take up the lions share of references in the index to the report.

Such a focus might not, initially, give surprise in a report on reading, and, indeed this aspect of the report has received wide applause. However, I want to argue that such a focus is indeed odd and ultimately unproductive - though not because I have any brief to offer for "whole language," nor because I have anything against learning the phonological-graphemic code of English writing (Gee, 1994; in press-b). Ironically, the reasons why such a narrow focus is unproductive lay buried deep in the report itself.

Despite the many claims in the media and in myriad newsletters from educational organizations that the Academy report is heavily"pro-phonics" - and despite the heavy emphasis on phonological and phonics-based issues - the report contains significant, though backgrounded and publicly ignored, tensions in these respects. For example, consider the following remarks from the report, none of which are foregrounded in the report and all of which ought to make one pause before reveling in the efficacy of early, direct, and systematic training in phonological awareness and phonics:

Taken together, these studies indicate that training in phonological awareness, particularly in association with instruction in letters and letter-sound relationships, make a contribution to assisting at-risk children in learning to read. The effects of training, although quite consistent, are only moderate in strength, and have so far not been shown to extend to comprehension. Typically a majority of the trained children narrow the gap between themselves and initially more advanced students in phonological awareness and word reading skills, but few are brought completely up to speed through training, and a few fail to show any gains at all. (p. 251)

When classificatory analyses are conducted, phonological awareness in kindergarten appears to have the tendency to be a more successful predictor of future superior reading than of future reading problems [Wagner, 1997; Scarborough,1998]. That is, among children who have recently begun or will soon begin kindergarten, few of those with strong phonological awareness skills will stumble in learning to read, but many of those with weak phonological sensitivity will go on to become adequate readers.. ..

In sum, despite the theoretical importance of phonological awareness for learning to read, its predictive power is somewhat muted, because, at about the time of the onset of schooling, so many children who will go on to become normally achieving readers have not yet attained much, if any, appreciation of the phonological structure of oral language, making them nearly indistinguishable in this regard from children who will indeed encounter reading difficulties down the road. (p. 112)

Tracing the development of reading comprehension to show the necessary and sufficient conditions to prevent reading difficulty is not as well researched as other aspects of reading growth. In fact, as Cain [1996] notes, "because early reading instruction emphasizes word recognition rather than comprehension, the less skilled comprehenders' difficulties generally go unnoticed by their classroom teachers." (p. 77) The "fourth-grade slump" is a term used to describe a widely encountered disappointment when examining scores of fourth graders in comparison to younger children [Chall et al., 1990].... It is not clear what the explanation is or even that there is a unitary explanation. (p. 78)

... for students in schools in which more than 75 percent of all students received free or reduced-price lunches (a measure of high poverty), the mean score for students in the fall semester of first grade was at approximately the 44th percentile. By the spring of third grade, this difference had expanded significantly. Children living in high-poverty areas tend to fall further behind, regardless of their initial reading skill level. (p. 98)

There would seem to be an important theme here, one to which the Academy panel might well have paid a bit more heed. Tests of early phonological awareness (or lack of it) do not fruitfully select those students who will later have problems in learning to read (cf., "many of those with weak phonological sensitivity will go on to become adequate readers"). Interventions based on stressing phonological awareness and phonics do not enhance comprehension, though, of course, comprehension is the basis of learning, and reading is rather pointless without it. Furthermore, although a stress on phonological awareness and overt phonics instruction does initially help at-risk students, it does not bring them up to par with more advantaged students, and they tend to eventually fall back, fueling a fourth-grade or later "slump" (this fact is amply documented in the report; see pp. 216, 228,232, 248-249, 251, 257).

None of these issues - how to select those who will have trouble learning to read, how to ensure that readers can comprehend well, how to explain and stop the fourth-grade (or later) slump - are dealt with in this report with anything like the detail or care given to phonological awareness and phonics. In fact, we might ask, how, if children in poor schools fall further and further behind"regardless of their initial reading skill level," increasing their initial reading skills levels through more and better phonological awareness training and phonics is going to speak to the problem.

The report does, of course, call for teaching comprehension skills, but acknowledges that, unfortunately, we know little about the development of such skills, as if we can, therefore, blithely ignore this ignorance and make recommendations about reading instruction in the absence of such knowledge. Furthermore, the teaching for comprehension the report calls for is all generic (things like summarizing or asking oneself questions while reading), not rooted in any details about learning specific genres and practices and certainly not about learning different sorts of content (e.g., science, literature, or math). Yet reading (and, for that matter, speaking) always and only occurs within specific practices and genres in the service of some purpose or content. The worldwide genre movements, which have stressed this fact about literacy and its myriad implications for pedagogy, go virtually unreferenced in the Academy report (e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1994; Christie,1990; Cope & Kalantzis,1993; Freedman & Medway, 1994 Martin,1989).

All of these problems and issues might have, one would have thought, led the writers of the Academy report to contextualize "reading problems" within larger issues about learning and content, but they do no such thing. They write, for the most part, as if children first learn to read generically ("in general"), and then later, read specific "somethings" in order to learn content. The panel never seems to feel the need to actually argue for this assumption that children who first learn "to read" in this generic sense are then and thereby equipped to read to learn content. But, of course, we know perfectly well that people can know how to read, in the sense of decode and engage in word recognition, and even achieve basic comprehension, and still not know how to read to learn. That is precisely why we have the so-called fourth-grade slump. It would seem that any solution to early reading problems that leaves the fourth-grade slump intact and does not speak to its relevance to reading issues, or does not ensure later mastery of academic content at high levels, is a waste of time and money.

Language Abilities

There is a sort of "Necker's Cube" perspectival phenomenon in the Academy report. Much of the report is driven by the correlation between early phonological awareness and later success in learning to read, though the report readily acknowledges that such a correlation does not prove that phonological awareness causes success in reading. However, the report acknowledges (but otherwise ignores) that another correlation is just as significant (if not more so as that between early phonological awareness and learning to read: this is the correlation between early language abilities and later success in reading. And, in fact, early language abilities and early phonological awareness are themselves correlated:

Chaney [1992] also observed that performance on phonological awareness tasks by preschoolers was highly correlated with general language ability. Moreover it was measures of semantic and syntactic skills, rather than speech discrimination and articulation, that predicted phonological awareness differences.(p.53)

What is most striking about the results of the preceding studies is the power of early preschool language to predict reading three to five years later. (pp. 107-108)

On average, phonological awareness (r = .46) has been about as strong a predictor of future reading as memory for sentences and stories, confrontation naming, and general language measures. (p. 112)

One must wonder what the Academy report would have looked like had the importance of early language abilities, and not early phonological awareness, been the driving force behind it, as it very well could have. There is a wholly different report, using all the same literature the Academy report cites, to be written here. One suspects that it was the urge to make the Academy report a "report on reading," and to speak within the frame of current public debates about reading, that led the Academy panel to stress the correlation between early phonological awareness and learning to read and to virtually ignore, or, at least, seriously background, the correlation between language abilities (of which phonological awareness is but one and not the most important) and learning to read.

The Academy report acknowledges, as I said above, that correlations do not mean causation, and, thus, that one cannot, without further evidence (which we do not have), argue from the correlation between early phonological awareness and later success in learning to read that the former causes the latter. Nonetheless, the report repeatedly calls for training in phonological awareness and overt and systematic instruction on the phonological-graphemic code. Surely, however, it is more plausible to argue that early language abilities cause both phonological awareness and later success in learning to read. At the very least, we ought to worry about just what early language abilities we are talking about and how these can be enhanced. We ought to worry, as well, about what instructional methods and interventions would have flowed from taking early language abilities seriously.

So what are these early language abilities that seem to be most importart for later success in school? According to the report, they are things like vocabulary (receptive vocabulary, but more especially expressive vocabulary, see p. 107), the ability to recall and comprehend sentences and stories, as well as the ability to engage in verbal interactions. Furthermore, what causes such verbal abilities seems to be fairly dear, though it is much less clear how to enhance them through specific school-based instructional methods, at least as far as these are construed in the current reading debates. What appears to cause enhanced verbal abilities are family, community, and school language environments in which children interact intensively with adults and more advanced peers and experience cognitively challenging talk and texts on sustained topics and in different genres of oral and written language (see pp.106108; ironically, perhaps, Catherine Snow, the chair of the Academy panel, and her students, have, over the years, done an impressive body of work that, in my opinion, shows just this).

However, the correlation between language abilities and success in learning to read, and in school generally, as it is talked about in the Academy report, hides an important reality Almost all children - including poor children - have impressive language abilities. The vast majority of children enter school with large vocabularies, complex grammar, and deep understandings of experiences and stories. It has been decades since anyone believed that poor and minority children entered school with "no language" (Gee,1996; Labov, 1972).

The verbal abilities that children who fail in school fail to have are not just some general Set of such abilities, but rather specific verbal abilities tied to school practices and school-based knowledge. The children whose vocabularies are larger in ways that enhance their early school success, for instance, are children who know, and especially can use, more words tied to the forms of language that schools use (and other areas of life that recruit "academic" language). A focus on phonological awareness can hide a wider paradox about school success: the more you already know about school itself, and in particular, about school-based language and school practices (not just language "in general" or how much phonemic awareness you have), before you go to school, the better you do in school.

Social Languages and the "Code"

Recent controversies over"whole language" and phonics have misled people into thinking that the most important design feature of written language is the phono (sound) - graphic (writing) "code" that relates sounds (phonemes) to letters. This is a mistake. The design features of written language are, of course, far more extensive than this. For example, just as sounds map to letters in written language, certain forms of vocabulary, syntax (sentence structure), and discourse connectors (devices that connect sentences together to make a whole integrated text) map to specific styles of written language and the oral forms related to these. Following is an example taken from a school science textbook (from Martin 1990, p. 93):

1. The destruction of a land surface by the combined effects of abrasion and removal of weathered material by transporting agents is called erosion .... The production of rock waste by mechanical processes and chemical changes is called weathering.

A whole bevy of design features mark these sentences as part of a distinctive "register" or style of academic language (what I have elsewhere called a"social language," see Gee,1996). Some of these features are"heavy subjects" ("the production of rock waste by mechanical processes and chemical changes"); processes and actions named by nouns or nominalizations, rather than verbs ("production"); passive main verbs ("is called") and passives inside nominalizations ("production by mechanical means"); modifiers that are more informative than the nouns they modify ("transporting agents"); and complex embedding ("weathered material by transporting agents" is a nominalization embedded inside "the combined effects of ...;' and this more complex nominalization is embedded inside a yet larger nominalization, "the destruction of ...").

This style of language also incorporates a great many distinctive discourse markers, that is, linguistic features that characterize larger stretches of text and give them unity and coherence as a certain type of text or genre. For example, the genre here is explanatory definition, and it is characterized by classificatory language of a certain sort. Such language leads adept readers to form a classificatory scheme in their heads something like this: There are two kinds of change - erosion and weathering - and two kinds of weathering - mechanical and chemical.

This mapping - from elements of vocabulary, syntax, and discourse to a specific style of language used in characteristic social activities - is just as much a part of reading and writing as is the "phonics" mapping. In fact, many more people fail to succeed in school (e.g., fail to get through highs school and into college) because of failing to master this sort of mapping than the "phonics" one.

This discussion of specific styles of language leads to a crucial aspect of the New Literacy Studies: When we read, write, or speak, we are always reading, writing, and speaking not "English" per se, but a specific form of English fit to and for specific activities (or practices) and connected to a specific socially situated identity (connected, in turn, to distinctive sorts of motivations, goals, and purposes). I will call each such form of English a "social language;' because each of them is connected to (fit to and for) different distinctive sociocultural activities and identities (Gee,1996; in press-a). The integrated nexus of social language-activity-identity is the heart of the New Literacy Studies (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Lave & Wenger,1991). It is fruitless, the New Literacy Studies would claim, to concentrate on one of these aspects (language form, activity, identity) without the others.

As an example, consider a second-grade classroom in Concord, Massachusetts that appears in some teacher-training materials produced by Ts Rc (Rosebery, Puttick, & Bodwell,1996). The children are engaged in smallgroup experiments on fast-growing plants to test their hypothesis that"light makes plants grow better, in the sense of being greener and straighter." Their work involves a set of linked activities - forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, further refining their hypothesis, carrying out their experiment, reporting its results, and defending their conclusions to their whole class in a final "sense-making" discussion. These activities each recruit a set of distinctive and related forms of language (involving things like relational verbs, nominalizations, technical terms, classificatory schemes, causal statements about mediating variables, and so forth). Finally, to position oneself appropriately within these activities and forms of language, the children must adopt a characteristic set of motivations, purposes, attitudes, values, ways of acting and interacting that constitute a socially situated identity different from their everyday or "lifeworld" identities and from the identities they must adopt, for example, when they do poetry or take a standardized reading test (each of which involves a different language form-- activity-identity nexus). One can easily fail in school by getting any or all of language, activity, and identity "wrong." In fact, we can go further and claim that a student cannot, in the end, master one without mastering the others in a reflexive process, though they may develop at different rates at different times in different contexts.

People who take a narrow view of reading often think that such matters are not really relevant to young children learning to read. The New Literary Studies, though, do not see young children learning to read, but rather young children getting scaffolded socialization (enculturation) into different and multiple literacy practices, each connected to specific forms of language, specific activities, and specific identities.

Children in school, as they acquire different literacies, are engaged, in each and every case, in learning a new social language. The first form of language children acquire in life - their home-based vernacular - is supported by their biology and does not require overt instruction (Gee, 1994, in press-b). But all later forms of oral and written language - the social languages connected to schools, workplaces, and other public sphere institutions - have no such biological support (though, of course, they all build on the vernacular base). All of these require additional sorts of outside cognitive and social support beyond what is required for the acquisition of one's native vernacular (Delpit,1995; Gee,1994). Note that this claim, which is now often made in regard to writing, is just as true of forms of oral language beyond our native vernaculars. Just as genes do not help you to learn to write physics, for example, they do not help you to speak it or do it, because physics, like writing, came on the human evolutionary scene too late to be "in" our genes in any sense. The same is true of any form of school-based, institutionally sited, or public sphere language.

What is crucial, then, is to ask what sorts of instructional support and scaffolding are necessary (with and within immersion in practice, of course) for developing social languages, most of which involve both talking/ listening and writing/reading. In fact - perhaps ironically so - much research, from a wide variety of areas, is beginning to converge on certain forms of interactional talk (about and using written texts) as a crucial form of such support for mastery of both the oral and written forms of social languages, as well as the forms of thinking and problem solving they involve (Anderson, Chin, Waggoner, & Nguyen,1998; Gass, Mackey, & Pica, 1998; Raphael,1998; Resnick, Saljo, Pontecorvo, & Burge, 1998). In my view, the forms of interactional talk that appear to be important for the development of school-based or other sorts of public sphere social languages are those that have three features: comprehensible input (Krashen,1985), comprehensible or "pushed" output (Swain,1985), and a focus on metareflection language and thinking (Bruer,1993). Each of these crucially involves pairings between form and function in language.

By "comprehensible input," I mean situations where the surrounding talk, environment, and instruction makes, not just the meaning, but the way in which specific aspects of language form fit with specific functions, clear and redundant at or just beyond the current level of the student's expertise. By "comprehensible output" or "pushed output," I mean situations where the learner has ample opportunity to produce and, crucially, to revise talk based on direct and indirect feedback from listeners about, not only whether and how they have understood the speaker's talk, but also about how various aspects of the form of the speaker's language is or is not working to communicate the meanings he or she intends. By a "focus on meta-reflection," I mean situations where the interactional talk contains moments that "rise to the meta-level" and talk directly about language, especially about how forms and functions relate to each other, and directly about thinking, especially how representations (inside the head and outside it on paper, for example) and functions relate to each other.

Learning to read means learning to read specific social languages connetted to specific activities and identities. If the above conditions are necessary or, at least, important for mastery of any social language, whether in writing, reading, speaking, or listening (especially for "latecomers;' that is, those students who come to any educational site without the advantages and early preparation that other students have had), then we cannot discuss reading and reading difficulties without discussing these conditions. The Academy report on reading has little or nothing to say about these matters, perhaps because they are seen as relevant to learning and language and not to reading per se ("real reading"). The argument of the New Literacy Studies is that there is, alas, no such thing as reading per se, or at least, if this is what reading is for you, you're in trouble.

The Academy report is built around an all too common divide between reading in the early primary grades as "real reading" (decoding, word recognition, and comprehension of"literal meaning") and reading in the later grades as reading within specific learning-focused, content-based, or disciplinary practices. Such a divide fails to ensure we won't simply reproduce the fourth-grade slump. The New Literacy Studies would argue that "real reading" decontextualized from social practices is, at any age, useless. It would focus, instead, on how people, from childhood to adulthood, learn to leverage new school-based (and other public sphere) social languages in speech, writing, and action - to participate in, and eventually critique and transform, specific sociocultural practices.

Editorial note. In this article, the author refers to the "National Academy of Sciences Report." The National Academy of Sciences is the umbrella agency for several groups associated with the development of that report. For example, in other publications and contexts, the report discussed here has been referred to as the report of the "National Research Council's Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties" or simply the report of the "Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties:' We wish to note that all of these references are to the same report. The National Research Council is a major subagency of the National Academy of Sciences, and the committee responsible for developing and writing the report was charged by the National Research Council.

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James Paul Gee

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

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