In the following comparative essay I will be discussing the literacy of practices used outside of school for pleasure by comparing and contrasting the reading, writing and digital literacy use of British Asian girls and Welsh girls and how this has influenced or affected their bicultural and bilingual identity using information from an article written by Susan Jones in 2006, as well as information I’ve gained from my lectures and own personal experience.
Literacy practices includes everything you read and write. If you are reading and writing for pleasure you are choosing what you want to read or write in your free time. Fry suggests that “what we choose to read, or simply the books we have in our possession, are indices of the ways in which we want to be seen and the ways we see ourselves”(Fry, 1985, p.96). The Welsh girls are more comfortable with reading welsh as the texts are more contemporary in nature compared to the texts which the British-Asian girls read but they still choose to read texts that are English as there is not a large variety of magazines and novels available in Welsh. The British Asian girls have a larger variety of text books in their home language but they find it hard to read as it’s not
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It is seen that reading British magazines is frowned upon by the elder Asian community, especially males like fathers and grandfathers because in their religion and culture they do not dress the way the girls in the magazines dress such as wearing bikinis. Further studies indicated that the British-Asian girls prefer reading fiction books in their home language because their “mother tongue” doesn’t suit or agree what is being read in the fiction