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Literacy,
Orality, and Cognition: An Overview
an
essay by Mark Willis (1994)
Literacy often is discussed
in contrast to opposite conditions, illiteracy and orality. There is
no consensus for a single definition of literacy. At the root of most
definitions are the abilities to read and write. The etymology of the
word, derived from the Latin littera (letter), implies the ability
to read and write using an alphabetic writing system. Despite the emphasis
on mechanical skills, common definitions of literacy also imply social,
educational, or intellectual status. In recent years, definitions have
been tied to the social and political implications of literacy. (Bendor-Samuel,
1992) Heath (1992) defines literacy as a social phenomenon embracing
the skills necessary to store and retrieve information in written form.
While Heath (1992) emphasizes that literacy is a social condition, she
notes that it is tested or measured through the private activities of
individuals. Since the mid-twentieth century, levels of literacy for
broad social groups have been assessed using standardized measures of
individuals. The ability to sign one's name on a written document is
one such test of functional literacy. The difficulty in measuring literacy
is complicated today by increasing societal demands to be literate in
different ways (Crystal, 1992), such as economic, scientific, or computer
literacy.
Pairing literacy in conceptual frameworks with illiteracy or orality
denotes that literacy is not an absolute condition; rather, it is a
continuum of conditions with many gradations. (Bendor-Samuel, 1992)
This report surveys current perspectives on the orality/literacy continuum
and its impact on human thinking. Orality is used here to mean the oral
use of language through speaking and listening. Researchers disagree
about how cognitive processes change across the orality/literacy continuum,
but there is broad consensus for the minimal view that "literacy
changes the actual and possible interactions between people and the
world" (Cole and Nicolopoulou, 1992, p. 343).
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Orality/Literacy Continuum |
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"Speech makes us human
and literacy makes us civilized" (Olson, 1988, p. 175). This statement
reflects a deeply held view that the development of language is an intrinsic
feature of human evolution. This view sometimes is expressed in dichotomies
that make clear distinctions between primitive/civilized-, magical/logical-,
or oral/literate thought processes. It can also be viewed as a dynamic
evolutionary continuum in which orality and literacy are interrelated
and interdependent. Oral uses of language preceded literate uses in
evolutionary terms, but literacy does not replace orality in human culture.
Just as civilized people do not cease to be humans, literate people
usually do not stop talking.
Ong (1982) distinguishes primary from secondary oral cultures. Primary
oral cultures (also called preliterate) have had no experience of written
language and no knowledge of the possibility of its existence. Secondary
oral cultures experience oral communication through electronic broadcast
media; while it is oral in transmission, this language use is nonetheless
shaped by written texts. Ong also describes literate cultures, ranging
on a continuum from early literate to high-literate, which have some
degree of "oral residue" (Ong, 1982, p. 36). Heath (1992)
observes that early literacy tasks include residual oral components
such as writing from dictation, reading aloud to others, and public
speaking from written texts. Long after the advent of alphabetic writing
in ancient Greece, oral language has continued to "empower and
embellish" written texts. (Heath, 1992, p. 337)
Tannen (1982) discusses the oral/literate continuum in a high-literate
culture, contemporary American society. She notes that oral cultures
emphasize language's metacommunicative function, the elaboration of
social relationships among communicators. Literate cultures emphasize
language's communicative function, the capacity to carry information
and content. Tannen categorizes these functions, respectively, as interpersonal
involvement and message content. The orality/literacy continuum reflects
an ongoing dynamic tension between involvement versus content in communication.
In the broadest contemporary
view of orality, literacy, and cognition, the development of literacy
along the oral/literate continuum marks a progressive or evolutionary
shift in human thought processes. This view derives from three principal
veins of research articulated by scholars such as Eric Havelock, Walter
Ong, and Jack Goody. The research embraces studies in pre- and post-Homeric
Greek culture (Havelock, 1982), where the first widely diffused alphabetic
writing system developed; early literate cultures in Western Europe
(Ong, 1982), where the transition from chirographic (or manuscript)
to print literacies nonetheless carried considerable oral residue; and
contemporary oral and early literate cultures (Goody, 1977 and Goody
and Watt, 1968), which have been studied in this century by social linguists
and anthropologists.
Ong (1982) summarizes this view thus: "Writing restructures consciousness"
(p. 78). The cognitive processes for creating, transmitting, storing,
and retrieving human knowledge are fundamentally different in oral and
literate cultures. The development of literacy itself leads to those
cognitive changes.
Orality and Thinking: Goody and Watt (1968) characterize the
transmission of knowledge in oral cultures as a "long chain of
interlocking conversations" (p. 29). The meaning of words is established
through direct semantic ratification in concrete situations, usually
accompanied by gestures and facial expressions. Grounded in face-to-face
events, knowledge is immediately experienced and deeply socialized.
Extended thought in oral cultures is stored and retrieved from memory
through mnemonic patterns called oral formulas. The formulas organize
information in carefully wrought clusters stored deep in the unconscious.
(Ong, 1982) Oral cultures strive to preserve formulaic knowledge intact
rather than dismantling it through analytic processes. Ong (1982) paraphrases
a famous summary statement from Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage
Mind (1966, p. 245) thus: "The oral mind totalizes" (Ong,
1982, p. 39).
Oral cultures tend to live in the present, not the past. The content
of knowledge is maintained in present rather than historical contexts.
It changes through a homeostatic process of forgetting or transforming
extraneous information. Inconsistencies in oral knowledge are transmuted
or glossed over rather than corrected through analysis. (Goody and Watt,
1968)
Writing and Thought: The advent of writing in literate cultures
changes the structure of knowledge and cultural tradition. Human interaction
is not limited to the impermanence of oral utterance in an event-bound
context. (Goody & Watt, 1968) Writing fixes utterance as visual
records that are stable, transferable across space and time, and cumulative
outside the memory of individuals.
Goody (1977) explains that writing transforms speech by abstracting
its components. Words in written texts are more "thing-like"
(Ong, 1982, p. 97). Their meaning can be looked up in other written
texts and do not require direct ratification through interpersonal situations.
Written texts enable backward-scanning of thought to make corrections
and resolve inconsistencies. This self-analysis or criticism is inhibited
by face-to-face communication in oral cultures.
Writing enables both the recording and the dissecting of verbal utterance.
Literate cultures have permanent records of past thought which can be
compared and questioned skeptically. Such skepticism enables the building
and testing of alternative explanations of knowledge. In ancient Greece,
the shift from oral to literate thought processes resulted in the "logical,
specialized, and cumulative intellectual tradition" of Plato. (Goody
and Watt, 1968, pp. 68-69)
Cole and Nicolopoulou (1992)
identify an alternative to the evolutionary view of literacy's intellectual
consequences. They designate the alternative as the contextual view.
It emphasizes the context-specific character of literate activities
and cognitive processes. The socially defined nature of reading and
writing leads to a multiplicity of diverse literacy practices. Basic
heterogeneity, not the uniform model advanced by the evolutionary view,
characterizes the cognitive processes associated with literacy.
The evolutionary view, according to Cole and Nicolopoulou, asserts that
information in written texts can be decontextualized, which they define
as "abstracted from the specific conditions of its generation and
transmission" (p. 344). Decontextualization allows intellectual
and emotional distance from knowledge, which fosters the critical or
reflexive thinking promoted in the evolutionary view.
Adherents of the contextual view maintain that literacy must be studied
through concrete social practices of reading and writing in specific
groups. This approach emphasizes the morphology of different literacy
practices, which does not flow inherently from the acquisition of technical
literacy skills. Morphologies are socially mediated, shaped by social
conventions and ideologies. (Cole & Nicolopoulou, 1992)
Scribner and Cole (1988) report research with the Vai people of Liberia
which supports the contextual view. In addition to English and Arabic
writing systems, the Vai use an indigenous, non-alphabetic script which
is transmitted informally rather than formally in a school setting.
Each form of Vai literacy is distinguished by specific skills associated
with specific cognitive effects. These are shaped by the social conditions
in which literacy activities take place as well as by political and
economic considerations.
A final aspect of the contextual view deserves mention. According to
Cole and Nicolopoulou (1992), the contextual view of literacy and cognitive
development emphasizes a continual interaction rather than a sharp dichotomy
between oral and literate modes in individuals and societies.
The significance of questions
about cognition across the oral/literate continuum extends beyond the
domains of the antiquarian, the historian of ideas, and the anthropologist.
Tannen (1982) explores orality and literacy in contemporary cross-cultural
issues. Farrell (1978) and Lazere (1991) discuss orality/literacy issues
in teaching basic writers. Daniell (1987) finds these issues relevant
to college composition teachers who undertake the mission of "teaching
literacy, writing, and rhetoric in a pluralistic society" (p. 12).
Noticeably absent from the orality/literacy literature are discussions
of people with disabilities for whom written texts are a barrier. These
include blind and visually impaired people who cannot see written texts
sufficiently to read them; people with physical disabilities who cannot
manipulate written texts sufficiently with their hands and arms; and
people with a range of learning disabilities who process visual information
in different ways. Literate persons who read primarily by listening
to live, recorded, or digitized oral presentations of written text represent
a largely uncharted territory in the orality/literacy continuum. Greater
understanding of their cognitive processes and literacy skills could
enhance their equal opportunities for education and equal access to
what may be the continuum's next phase: the information culture.
| Works
Cited |
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| 5 | Works Cited | 
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Bendor-Samuel, D. H. (1992).
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Cole, M. & Nicolopoulou, A. (1992). Literacy: Intellectual consequences.
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Crystal, D. (1992). An encyclopedic dictionary of language and languages.
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Daniell, B. (1987, March). The uses of literacy theory: The great
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Lazere, D. (1991). Orality, literacy, and Standard English. Journal
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Scribner, S. and Cole, M. (1988). Unpackaging literacy. In E. R. Kintgen,
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