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Fulbright New Century Scholars Program
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Parry, Kate

• Full Professor
  
• Hunter College, City University of New York
  
• Department of English
  
• United States

Kate Parry is a full professor in the English Department at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she teaches courses in linguistics. She has also taught courses there in English as a second language and advanced expository writing, and from 1987-1997 she coordinated the college’s Freshman Expository Writing program. During that period she carried out a series of research studies on ESL students’ acquisition of vocabulary in college courses, for which she received a TESOL Research Interest Section/Newbury House Distinguished Research Award in 1993. The course she now teaches most frequently is the History of the English Language, and she is writing a book on the topic provisionally entitled English Speakers: A Social and Linguistic History.

Whenever she does not have to be in New York, Professor Parry travels to Uganda. Her interest in the country began in 1968 when she went to Makerere College of the University of East Africa to train as a teacher of English and History, and she subsequently taught in an up-country secondary school for five years. She returned to Uganda in 1997 to teach at Makerere University until 1999, supported in part by a Fulbright Lecturing and Research award. Since then she has returned regularly, pursuing research in literacy practices and promoting literacy projects. In 2003 she was one of the main organizers of the 3rd Pan African Conference on Reading for all, which was held in Kampala and was sponsored by, among others, the International Reading Association and UNESCO. She has published a volume of papers from this conference (2005) and is at present working on a second one. Her main interest in Uganda, however, is in community libraries. With local colleagues, she has set up a library project near a trading center called Kitengesa (see www.kitengesalibrary.org), which she supports by raising funds in New York; and she is now, as Chair of the Uganda Community Libraries Association, working to develop a network of such libraries throughout the country. Her most recent publications have been based on data collected through the Kitengesa library (e.g. 2004).

Professor Parry began her career in the United States by studying for a doctorate in applied linguistics at Teachers College of Columbia University. At that point her main focus was on Nigeria, where she taught English from 1976-83 at various teacher training institutions, and where she returned to do her doctoral research in 1983-4. This research examined the difficulties experienced by Northern Nigerian secondary school students in responding to the reading components of the West African School Certificate English Language exam. This research is represented in a a collection of papers that she edited with Professor Clifford Hill of Teachers College, which covers the problems of assessing English language reading skills worldwide (1994).

Professor Parry has also made extended visits to China, where she taught in 1992 and again in 1994-5 in the United Board College English program at Nanjing University. During her second visit she worked with her students to produce a book on Chinese literacy practices and how these practices affect the teaching and learning of English in China (1998). She brought the findings of this project together with her research from Nigeria in an article for the TESOL Quarterly (1996). She hopes that in the New Century Scholars Program she will similarly be able to draw the different strands of her international experience together to address the question of how the ways in which people acquire and practice literacy in English—whether as a first, second, or additional language—advance, or hinder, their access to higher education.

Select Publications

• Hill, C., & Parry, K. J. (Eds.). (1994). From testing to assessment: English as an international language. London: Longman.
• Parry, K. (2005). Teaching reading in African schools. Kampala: Fountain Publishers.
• Parry, K. J. (1996). Culture, literacy, and L2 reading. TESOL Quarterly, 30(4), 665–692.
• Parry, K. J. (2004). Opportunities for girls: A community library project in Uganda. In B. Norton & A. Pavlenko (Eds.), Gender and English language learners (pp. 81–93). Alexandria, VA: TESOL Publications.
• Parry, K. J., & Su, X. (Eds.). (1998). Culture, literacy, and learning English: Voices from the Chinese classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Access to Higher Education through Literacy Development

Literacy is fundamental to education at all levels, and literacy in English is especially important to higher education. Yet literacy—that is, the complex of social practices and beliefs and of individual skills and knowledge that are involved in the use of written text—is the source of basic inequities. Already when children enter kindergarten some are much more ready than others to learn how to read and write. The inequities build up as children progress through primary and secondary school: the well prepared, who tend also to be the privileged, build up their skills systematically and enjoyably while the less well prepared, who are often from impoverished backgrounds, become discouraged, perform badly, and eventually drop out. The inequities are compounded by differences of language. Among the most disadvantaged are those who cannot develop full literacy in their first language because it does not have a large enough corpus of written text. These students must develop their literacy in a second language, which makes it particularly hard for them to develop any sense of personal investment in written text and in the intellectual life that is based on it. Equally disadvantaged are those who develop their literacy in a language other than English and must then learn English in order to advance in higher education. The problems of such students, especially in Africa, are made even greater by the fact that too many schools have few books and no access to the internet; while outside the schools such literacy resources are often not available at all.