Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics”

This essay has a lot of information for students who are looking into becoming a teacher. Being a teacher is important to be able to read students and understand where they are coming from to help them learn better. Gee’s introduction explains “language” is more of the grammar, so that leads to a misleading term. Language has to do with the environment as which we speak in and how the grammar could be perfect in a phrase but may not fit with the environment. “ It is not just what you say, but how you say it” shows that Gee is staying that no matter what you say it might be wrong for the setting of the place or people that you are speaking to. Further in the reading, Gee brings up her way of writing “Discourses” with the capital “D” which are “ways of being in the world” meaning that language is a social role that is present in our beliefs, values, and attitudes. Discourses are like your self- identity, how you approach things and the way you are in your environment. There are many different types of Discourses just as primary and secondary, dominant and non- dominant ones. Primary Discourses are is the one we grow up with and “ make sense of the world and interact with others” and Secondary Discourses are the social institutions that are in the public sphere like school, the store, and etc. Dominant and non-dominant Discourses are secondary ones but which you master in a common place or mastery in an environment alone. Gee explains that two of these can interfere with each other because you may use the one in the other or mix up the grammatical features to the other.
Gee continues by referring this essay to teachers who want to teach a certain language to students. English teachers are the ones who need to find this balance of how to teach the students and ways of not interfering with their native tongue. “Vygotsky says that learning a foreign language “allows the child to understand his native language as a single instantiation of a linguistic system” which helps the child learn both the new language and their native but leads to the understanding which Gee uses the term “meta- knowledge” as one learning a language plus putting that to the real life situations which you would deal with.
In Conclusion, I believe that the rest of the essay of “what is literacy?” states Gee’s argument of how the way we speak in our environments and people is also literacy as well as the writing and grammar.