Homework #3

Summary of Gee’s article

In this article, the author Gee mainly discusses what literacy is -- ‘control of uses of language in secondary discourses’ (Gee, p.261). In order to explain clearly what literacy is, the author at first explains discourse and the distinction between primary and secondary discourse.  Firstly, he defines and explores in detail the word ‘discourse’--the social association that identity people’s social network by people’s language, thinking, and acting, and states that the discourse is ideological, internal testable, related to its opposing standpoint and social structure, and may conflicts with other certain ideas. Secondly, the author explores the difference between ‘primary discourses’, which is communication in intimate group such as family, and ‘secondary discourses’, which is the communication with non-intimates. After that, the  author talks about the relationship among learning, acquisition and literacy. He states that ‘acquisition is good for performance; learning is good for metalevel knowledge’. (Gee, p.259) People will master literacy by acquisition, but if people want to have powerful literacy, they need to not only acquire but also learn the literacy. Finally the author uses children from different social class as an example. He finds that the lower socio-economic black children speak English that is different from middle class children, and may encounter some challenge in school study, and give some suggestions to overcome these challenge to study the literacy..