A Historic Overview of Literacy Studies: From Orality to AI-Mediated Literacies

Abstract

This paper provides a historical and synthetic overview of literacy studies, tracing major theoretical paradigms from early concerns about orality and writing to behaviorist and cognitive perspectives, sociocultural and critical shifts, and the emergence of New Literacy Studies. The discussion integrates key theoretical frameworks, including Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective, Bakhtin’s dialogism, Bourdieu’s cultural capital, and Street’s ideological model of literacy, all of which have reoriented the field from skill-based models to those emphasizing practice and power. The paper further explores how literacy has expanded into digital, multimodal, and global contexts, with a particular focus on academic literacy and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), where genre-based and discourse-community perspectives have reshaped pedagogical approaches. The paper makes a critical contribution by arguing that literacy studies is at a pivotal inflection point: the rise of AI-mediated systems, algorithmic sorting, and the rhetorical demands of prompt design necessitate an expansion of the field’s conceptual toolkit. Specifically, the study calls for the integration of AI literacy, prompt literacy, and algorithmic/data literacies into educational frameworks, which challenge traditional notions of authorship, agency, and pedagogy. This paper uniquely contributes by offering empirical and pedagogical insights for elementary, secondary, and tertiary education, detailing how AI-related literacies should be integrated into curricula to foster critical engagement, ethical reasoning, and equitable access. In doing so, it presents actionable recommendations for developing literacy programs that maintain humanistic values and ensure educational equity in rapidly evolving digital and AI-infused learning environments.