Researching Literacy: A Methodological Map

Abstract

Literacy has been researched using many research methodologies and from within many disciplines including history, linguistics, education, philosophy, semiotics, sociology and anthropology. This chapter presents a map of applied research methodologies that have been used to explore the field of literacy, primarily from social perspectives. It does not claim to be a comprehensive map covering all the forms of socially oriented research that can be applied to literacy, but throughout the chapter references are listed to extend the map in various ways. We have chosen to focus on those approaches which practitioner-researchers would find easier to work with in their local contexts. These approaches include action research, case study research, design-based research, discourse analysis, multimodal research, ethnographic research and verbal protocols. In addition, as shown in Chapter 2, historical research into literacy reveals how measures of what it means to be literate have changed over time. We finish this chapter with a brief explanation of meta-analysis because this statistical approach is now being used in educational fields to summarise findings from past studies in order to generalise about the size and nature of positive or negative effects of particular interventions on student achievement (for example, Hattie 2009). The final section of this chapter looks at what might constitute a continuing broad literacy research project into the 21st century, in which we hope our readers will participate.