Abstract
Research has described the importance of orality at work and in everyday life but little agreement currently exists on how to theorize modern orality. This study explores how young adult literacy learners thought about and employed their textual (print) literacy within the oral contexts of their lives. We interviewed 88 mainly unemployed young persons undertaking literacy training to assess how their literacy fitted within their everyday lives, exploring their learning, employment, motivation, persistence, barriers to learning, and power dynamics. Respondents saw their textual literacy as situated within a matrix of everyday interpersonal communication more than as stand-alone functional skills, describing how literacy integrates with oral-experiential lifeworlds such as at work. Empirical evidence was provided to support the recent work of scholars who are building theory in the text–orality nexus. This study provides insights into the oral world of people with liminal (threshold) textual literacy; since such individuals are necessarily more oral than literate in their everyday life experience, they provide unique insights into how their orality intersects with use of textual information.
About the authors
Frank Sligo’s PhD was from Massey University and explored sources of information employed by New Zealand knowledge workers. He is currently Professor of Communication at Massey University and his research interests have included information poverty, the knowledge-gap hypothesis, adult literacy, and issues around the knowledge–behavior gap in organizational and community settings.
Elspeth Tilley’s PhD from the University of Queensland was entitled White vanishing: A settler Australian hegemonic textual strategy, 1789–2006. She is currently Associate Professor at Massey University and her research has investigated language, power, values, and meaning at broad cultural levels and within narrower personal or professional foci such as in workplace questions of ethics, gender, adult literacy, and identity.
Niki Murray’s PhD from Massey University was in the psychology of motivation and persistence among young adult learners. She is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, Massey University, and her research includes adult literacy, health communication, stress, coping, and issues in the project management of large research projects.
Margie Comrie’s PhD from Massey University investigated the character of changes in television news and she is currently Associate Professor at Massey University. Her research has included studies of political communication, public service media, gender and media, health literacy and health communication, adult literacy, science communication, modes of public consultation and community campaigns.
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