Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction

JAMES PAUL GEE

Gee, James P. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction.” Journal of Education 171.1 (1989): 5–17. Print.

Framing the Reading

James Paul Gee (his last name is pronounced like the “gee” in “gee whiz”) is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literary Studies at Arizona State University. Gee has taught linguistics at Stanford, Northeastern University, Boston University, and the University of Southern California. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990) was important in the formation of the interdisciplinary field known as “New Literacy Studies,” and he’s published a number of other works on literacy as well, including Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul (2005). Based on his research, he’s a widely respected voice on literacy among his peers.

In this article, Gee introduces his term Discourses, which he explains as “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” that are “ways of being in the world” (para. 5). (The capital D is important for Gee, to make a Discourse distinct from discourse, or “connected stretches of language” that we use every day to communicate with each other.) Gee spends a lot of time working to make these definitions clear, using a variety of examples. A number of other terms crop up as well in his work: dominant and nondominant Discourses, primary and secondary Discourses, literacy, apprenticeship, metaknowledge, and mushfake, among others. Probably the most useful way to read this article for the first time is to try to (1) define terms and (2) apply what Gee is saying to your own experience by thinking of related examples from your own life.

There is one particularly controversial argument in the article. Gee insists that you can’t “more or less” embody a Discourse—you’re either recognized by others as a full member of it or you’re not. Many readers can’t make this argument line up with their perceptions of their own experiences in acquiring new Discourses; they haven’t experienced this “all-or-nothing” effect. It’s also possible to read Gee’s article as undermining itself: He explains that we are never “purely” members of a single Discourse but, rather, that a given Discourse is influenced by other Discourses of which we’re also members. By this reasoning, there may be no such thing as embodying a Discourse fully or perfectly.

The important thing is this: When you encounter that subargument, or others you might have trouble accepting, your job as a reader is to stay engaged in the overall argument while “setting aside” the particular argument you’re not sure about. As you know from your own experience, people can be wrong about smaller points while still being right about bigger ones. Further, scholarly arguments are made very precisely with very careful language; Gee’s argument might work if you read it exactly as he intended it to be understood, without trying to apply it too broadly. But you should also read critically and test his claims against your experiences.

If you are interested in seeing and hearing from Gee directly, you can watch a short MacArthur Foundation video of him talking about games and learning by searching YouTube for “James Gee games learning.”