New Literacies : A Dual-Level Theory of the Changing Nature of Literacy, Instruction, and Assessment

Literacy as Deixis

Today, the nature of literacy has become deictic. This simple idea carries impor-tant implications for literacy theory, research, and instruction that our field mustbegin to address. Deixis is a term used by linguists (Filmore, 1966; Murphy, 1986;Traut & Kazzazi, 1996) to define words whose meanings change rapidly as theircontext changes. Tomorrow, for example, is a deictic term; the meaning of “tomor-row” becomes “today” every 24 hours. The meaning of literacy has also becomedeictic because we live in an age of rapidly changing information and commu-nication technologies, each of which requires new literacies (Leu, 1997, 2000).Thus, to have been literate yesterday, in a world defined primarily by relativelystatic book technologies, does not ensure that one is fully literate today wherewe encounter new technologies such as Google docs, Skype, iMovie, Contribute,Basecamp, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, foursquare, Chrome, educational video-games, or thousands of mobile “apps.” To be literate tomorrow will be defined byeven newer technologies that have yet to appear and even newer discourses andsocial practices that will be created to meet future needs. Thus, when we speak ofnew literacies we mean that literacy is not just new today; it becomes new everyday of our lives.