Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-11T10:56:10.372Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Voices in Dialogue – Hybridity as Literacy, Literacy as Hybridity: Dialogic Responses to a Heteroglossic World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2010

Alice A. Miano
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Arnetha F. Ball
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Sarah Warshauer Freedman
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Get access

Summary

What is hybridization? A mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor.

– M. M. Bakhtin, (1981, p. 358)

Compiling this commentary seemed a unique assignment. True, students are often expected to contrast or critique various ideas, arguments, or literary forms in published works. However, for this commentary, we were asked to relate or otherwise make sense, not of texts seemingly congealed in print, but of exchanges created through an ostensibly more tentative, transitory medium, e-mail. Texts produced for publication are generally expected to be developed, edited, and manicured with great care, but an e-mail may be dashed off with little time devoted to spelling or punctuation, let alone to ideas. Yet, despite such perceptions about print vs. electronic media, the ideas in the e-mails that served as sources for this commentary, e-mails from Gee, Kalman, Mahiri, and Sperling, were both thoughtful and thought provoking. At the same time, the process of reading early versions of the authors' contributions to this volume, posing questions to the authors, and then receiving feedback from them via e-mail highlighted for me both the hybrid and dialogic natures (Bakhtin, 1981), not only of e-mail, but also of the writing process itself (see also Brettschneider, this volume).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press
Ferdman, B. (1990). Literacy and cultural identity. Harvard Educational Review, 60(2):181–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferdman, B. (1991). Becoming literate in a multiethnic society. In E. Jennings & A. Purves (Eds.), Literate systems and individual lives: Perspectives on literacy and schooling. Albany: State University of New York Press
Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourse (2nd ed.). London: Routledge Falmer
Goody, J., & Watt, I. (1968). The consequences of literacy. In J. Goody (Ed.), Literacy in traditional societies (pp. 27–68). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Gutiérrez, K., Baquedano-López, P., & Alvarez, H. H. (2001). Literacy as hybridity: Moving beyond bilingualism in urban classrooms. In M. L. Reyes & J. J. Halcón (Eds.), The best for our children: Critical perspectives on literacy for Latino students. New York: Teachers College Press
Lam, W. S. E. (2000). L2 Literacy and the design of the self: A case study of a teenager writing on the Internet. TESOL Quarterly, 34(3):457–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 60–92. Reprinted in B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 9–37). London: Routledge, 1999
Olson, D. R. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Education Review, 47: 257–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Routledge
Reyes, M. L., & Halcón, J. J. (2001). Introduction. In M. L. Reyes & J. J. Halcón (Eds.), The best for our children: Critical perspectives on literacy for Latino students. New York: Teachers College Press
Schultz, K., & Hull, G. (2002). Locating literacy theory in out-of-school contexts. In G. Hull & K. Schultz (Eds.), School's out: Bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice. New York: Teachers College Press
Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×