Teacher education: retextualization processes and literacy practices

Abstract

The aim of the project is to investigate the literacy practices of various literacy agents, both in school and community contexts. The project will describe text and discourse mechanisms that allow teachers to beck me familiar with the literacy practices of prestigious academic and formalistic institutions within their own context of job-related literacy practices, with a view to developing a professional cultural identity, which necessitates, therefore, a perspective which goes beyond an instrumental view of reading and writing. The project starts from the premises that teachers' literacy practices that permit them to act as true literacy agents in the school context depend on the functions that writing has in their lives and on their understanding and ability to transform non-school literacy practices. We propose four research topics related to those practices, based on a discursive and socio-cognitive perspective of reading and writing as retextualization processes (the transformation of a written or oral text into another) used by teachers, by their college professors and by authors who write texts and manuals for their professional training about language and about being a language teacher. The research topics are: retextualizations and text production, legibility and teacher's readings, founding genres and literacies in Practice. The research methodology is interpretive, and involves subjects with different levels of familiarity with written language usage and practices. There will be a variety of instruments and techniques used for data collecting, such as interviews, participant observation, document generation. The data to be analyzed will thus consist of transcriptions of different speech event in various learning situations,(such as class lesson, seminars, reading discussions); transcriptions of interviews; written texts produced by the subjects, belonging to the different academic and school games under investigation (such as summary, review, report, plan, project, article, answers to questions). Among the most important project results we foresee the production of books, text collections and manuals in the area of language studies for teacher education and the qualification of the teachers' literacy practices, taking into account both the context of the workplace and the development of a professional identity. (AU)