Literacies and Quechua oral language: sociocultural worlds and linguistic created by María Teresa De La Piedra

This article presents partial findings of an ethnographic study in a Quechua rural community in the Peruvian Andes. It discusses the uses of hegemonic Spanish literacy practices in the school. These were characterized by emphasis on formal issues over meaning; students’ lives, cultural, and linguistic resources were ignored. However, there were spontaneous uses of literacy by children that resisted the school’s dominant literacy practices. Local literacy practices in other social contexts included the use of oral Quechua in order to make meaning of written text. These are cultural resources that teachers may use in the classroom. The article offers a discussion of ‘hybrid literacy practices’ as possibilities for connecting sociocultural worlds and linguistic resources for biliteracy and academic development.