Gee's "what is literacy"

1. Literacy is control of secondary use of language.
Dominant literacy is control of a secondary use of language used in what I called above a “dominant discourse”.
Powerful literacy is control as a secondary use of language used in a secondary discourse that can serve as a meta-discourse to critique the primary discourse of other secondary discourses, including dominant discourses.
Thus, literacy is mastered through acquisition, not learning, that is, it requires exposure to models in natural meaningful, and functional settings, and teaching is not liable to be very successful-it may even initially get in the way.

2. This changes my understanding of literacy a little, not a lot. Gee focuses on acquisition instead of learning to master literacy. Gee expressed an example of Mainstream middle class children, he mentioned that he learning they are doing, provided it is tied to good teaching, is giving them not the literacy, but meta-level cognitive and linguistic skills that they can use to critique various discourses throughout their lives. He separates learning cognitive and linguistic skills from literacy. My own literacy story is totally about learning, learning to know and master specialist language. In his point in the article, since little acquisition thereby goes on, children often cannot use this learning-teaching to develop meta-level skills since this requires some degree of acquisition of secondary discourse to use in the critical process, Gee puts the acquisition to a higher level.