Cross-disciplinary literacy: supporting cultural content study through language analysis

Abstract

To function successfully in the present-day world people need to develop special literacies enabling them to move across various content fields. It is the more important as they increasingly wish to learn to understand the world on their own from their personal interactions with others, cultural conventions or the omnipresent exposure and interaction with public media, including the most powerful resource – the Internet (Wallace, 2003: 8). However, one’s own independence in discovering how the world is structured and run and how it is described in the language sphere is very often illusionary. It thus becomes crucial to advocate solutions which highlight the need to read and reason with information of varying types and complexities. Such an attitude may help to engage with the broad knowledge that in today’s world transcends national and cultural boarders.