ENGLISH TEACHERS’ CONCEPTUALIZATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LITERACY IN RELATION TO INDONESIA’S GERAKAN LITERASI SEKOLAH (SCHOOL LITERACY INITIATIVE)

This study aims to explore how, in relation to Indonesia’s Gerakan Literasi Sekolah (GLS – School Literacy Initiative), Indonesian English teachers of secondary schools conceptualize L2 literacy in terms of linguistic and other sign systems, cognitive, sociocultural, and developmental dimensions, a model of literacy beliefs profile by Kucer (2014). The data were collected through a survey questionnaire adapted from Kucer’s model, comprising 37 closed-ended items on conceptual understandings of foreign language literacy, presented in values of 1 to 5 Likert-scale indicating statements from strongly disagree (SD), disagree (D), neutral (N), agree (A), to strongly agree (SA). After being moderated for validity and clarity, the questionnaire was distributed to various groups and forums of English teachers through Google-form. With this convenience sampling procedure, 157 English teachers, mostly from East Java Province, Indonesia, responded to our questionnaire. The results of descriptive analyses in the forms of mean percentages portray how English teachers in our study successfully frame L2 language literacy as reflected in Kucer’s dimensions, which potentially equip them with knowledge about taking part in the success of GLS implementation. They seem to understand that the core of literacy lies in the cognitive dimension, suggesting the use of literacy to express meanings, and that the expressions of meaning require linguistic literacy dimension as the vehicle. These cognitive and linguistic literacy dimensions are affected by the sociocultural literacy dimension, and the employment of the three dimensions tends to continually exist as we are experiencing new and novel events from day to day. Future research might focus on exploring how these understandings about literacy are finally realized in the classroom.

Investigating Ethics in Sociocultural Literacy Studies

This conceptual article addresses theories of ethics in literacy studies. Here, ethics means people’s ways of defining, asking about, and living good lives. Although literacy researchers have paid some attention to ethics, they rarely theorize ethics overtly. To demonstrate the need for a clearer concept of the ethical dimension of literacy, this article shows how the author’s earlier study of activists’ literacies was limited by an underdeveloped theory of ethics. The article reviews ideas from recent work in the anthropology of ethics that can draw out and draw together literacy studies’ largely implicit concepts of ethics. Through this discussion, the article presents a clearer theory of the ethical dimension of literacy. The article concludes by using this new theory to study the ethics in the literacy practices of an LGBTQIA activist.