Reading 3.3-Critical literacy: a linguistic perspective

The information in this unit that I found interesting is about the key elements of text. These elements have technical names such as ‘genre’, ‘field’, ‘tenor’, ‘mode’, and ‘ideology’. Wignell’s aim is to discover elements of language to ‘dig out’ the ideology that exists, as it were, behind the text. Texts are always about something (they have a field), they position readers interpersonally (tenor), they vary in degree of abstraction (mode), they have some overall shape (genre) and they invariably have some either overt or covert ideological position (ideology). All these are realized through the specific language choices in the text. The role of a linguistic approach to literacy as making explicit the technology of written text, how written language works and how we can use this knowledge to become critical literate. Some explicit knowledge about how language works as making the task of becoming a text analyst or critically literate person easier. Wignell argues that even a text that seems innocently devoid of ideology may in fact be shown to be highly ideological. His sample text are passage from a junior secondary commerce textbook (Parker.B, Clarke. T, and Charter. P.(1988)Commerce Two Melbourne, Macmillian). For me, the discussion is not as detailed as it could be and it will be a little bit difficult to understand, instead the writer have selected a relevant aspects of the texts and looked at them through the filters of genre, register and lexico-grammar in an effort to ‘dig out’ the ideology behind the texts.