Exploring Pluriliteracy As Theory and Practice in Multilingual/Cultural Contexts

Abstract

This paper is situated in language and literacy studies (Gee 1996) and Malaysian Studies (Tan,
1992; Shamsul, 1999;Maznah and Wong, 2001; Ooi, 2001) and explores what I theorise to be the
pluriliteracy (Koo 2004) of Malaysian tertiary leamers in relation to the discourses of the
community, nation-state and globalisation. It takes the perspective of linguistic practices as
involving culture (as interpretive systems of meaning involving webs of significance (Geertz,
1973) and linguistic processes as sociocultural practice (Kress, 1989). The pluriliteracy of the
multilingual meaningmakers in English is viewed in terms of a third space phenomenon
(Bhabha, 1994) a deep sociopolitical space marked by power and ideological divides.
Pluriliteracy views meaning-making and knowledge production as sociopolitical phenomena
involving decisions and reflections around the ideological embeddings of dominant cultures. The
third space is a complex and challenging space fraught with tensions for the multilingual learner,
where various literacies are accommodated, nativised and transformed within the intersection
and contradictions of community, national and global discourses. The paper explores the concept
of Reflexive Pluriliteracy in two ways: firstly, by examining the broad sociopolitical contexts of
Malaysia viewed as the intersection of the global with the nation-state and secondly, by
examining the micro meaning making literacy practices of two Malaysian meaning-makers, Su
and Beng. The broad and the micro are viewed as interpenetrating discursive discourses each
interacting with the other. In exploring the extant pluriliteracies of multilingual meaning-makers
as unfolding and as learned behavior, the paper argues for a pedagogy of reflexive Pluriliteracy.
It is argued that reflexive pluriliteracy will help provide a greater awareness of the politics and
tensions in various ways of knowing, in the third space of the simultaneously local-global, with
its tensions and ambivalence.