Article
Review of Style, Identity and Literacy
The Linguist List: International Linguistics Community Online
(2012)
Abstract
“Style, Identity and Literacy”, as its title suggests, explores the literacy practices and linguistic identities of a group of adolescent students in the context of a complex multicultural and multilingual society: Singapore. The authors make use of interview data to investigate how language either reasserts linguistic citizenship or is used to adopt styles that conform to global market necessities. Personal narratives are examined under the light of discursive and sociologically oriented perspectives, such as Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of ‘linguistic market’. The authors state that the book aims “to explore the reflexive and critical linguistic judgments about language and literacy in the voices of our informants” (2). Furthermore, since informants are living in the context of late-modern society, Stroud and Wee examine, at great length, modernist assumptions of language and society and consider methodological strategies that best describe these types of language communities. Therefore, this book includes a discussion of a variety of interrelated topics: linguistic globalization; language and education; social and linguistic inequalities; language policy; identity performance; and language variation in a late-modern, changing world.
Keywords
- applied linguistics,
- sociolinguistics
Disciplines
Publication Date
2012
Citation Information
Carolina I. Viera. "Review of Style, Identity and Literacy" The Linguist List: International Linguistics Community Online (2012) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/carolina-viera/1/