Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Reading

Week 6 - Answers

Ong, Chapters 1 and 3

1. What is the nature of the relationship between orality and literacy?

This is a difficult question for us to fathom because as highly literate individuals we simply can not understand what orality really means anymore. As children we definitely passed through an oral stage, but that stage is long since forgotten and we have been literate individuals for a very long time. Simply put, there's a very strong relationship between orality and literacy and in this relationship orality always will be primary. It is the basic skill that humans have in relation to language. Based on that observation, literacy is simply a further extension or theoretical abstraction from a basis of orality. The latter cannot exist without the former. This means it is very hard (maybe impossible) to become literate without being oral first and having achieved a certain level of proficiency as an oral being first. We all experienced a state of orality as children which gave a bases up which to build literacy. Later in life we would become literate and this has changed both the way we think and the way interact with the world at large. The best way to think about literacy is to think of literacy as kind of a supercharged orality, or better yet an upgraded orality. This kind of analogy fits because literacy does actually allow us to do many things that primarily oral people, but better and it also allows us to do things that primarily oral people are not able to do. At the same time, however, the onset of literacy also stops us from being able to do what we once did as oral beings. Literates see the world in a different way.

So, the relationship between orality and literacy is strong. One is a necessary prerequisite for the other, and the latter (literacy) needs to develop out of the former (orality). What is interesting, though, is that once literate we really forget our oral beginnings. You can never go home once you have crossed that bridge.

2. What is it that human beings in primarily oral cultures can and cannot do?

There are many things people in oral cultures obviously can do since the history of the human race is primarily oral and it is on a strictly oral base that we arrived almost to the level that we now enjoy. At the same time however, once we become literate and start to view this whole thing from a strongly literate point of view there are also many things that primarily oral individuals cannot do or certain things which cannot occur in primary oral societies. One of the most profound of these lacks that orals have this the ability to study. People in oral society learn by a system of apprenticeship. They cannot learn by themselves. They have to learn more directly than we do by observation and mimicking. They are not able to study and learn the way that we do in literate societies. For orals, language is related to concrete events. Now, events as well as language which is contained within them are fleeting. The concept, which is a central to us, of permanence is missing from their cognitive repertoire. This means that they are very much stuck in the here and now. It is easy to see have this would greatly limit what they are able to do. This doesn't mean that they are stupid. It simply means that they go about problem solving in a very differently than we do. It is difficult for orals to plan large complicated events in advance. What they do is replicate events from the past and bring them into the present.

3. Why is a the term ̋oral literature̋ so problematic, according to Ong?

The term oral literature is extremely problematic for anyone working in the area of oral tradition. The main problem with this term is the word literature. Literature is a term that is used to describe the texts that literate people are able to create. Going beyond that, it also describes the way that literate people deal with text. As illiterates we pride ourselves on our ability to manipulate the language within a text. We like to change things and alter things that are there and that is how we achieve our sense of power in the literate world. For primarily oral people these are very alien ideas. Oral people do not achieve power by manipulating things around them. Thus, the idea of text itself is something very foreign to oral people and literacy is built around the idea of text.

Thinking about this we can really get a feel for what it means to be literate. It is something that we take for granted, but we can't really afford to do this because we have to teach our students how to do the same things. Our students need to learn how to manipulate and deal with texts in English. We have to turn them into literates. Literacy demands certain skills.

4. How do primarily oral cultures view words?

How individuals in primary oral cultures view words is extremely interesting and can be strongly contrasted with how literates view words. This difference in viewpoints might very well explain why children, as primarily oral beings, tend to be able to learn languages more completely than adults. Primary oral people view language purely from its sound perspective. They do not have strong associations of permanence with language forms. Language forms, like the sound which generates them, are fleeting. This is an extremely strong statement and it might even be something that we have difficulty fathoming because we have such a strong permanent association with all language forms. For literates, language is really not about sound: language is about visuals and its association with the sound. As soon as we learn to identify certain graphemes and collections of graphemeic forms we lose a profound feel for the sound of the language. This has a profound effect on our psyche as well as how we view language.

Ambiguity Tolerance

It would seem that individuals living in primarily oral societies do not have a sense of right or wrong when it comes to language. They can't because they don't have a visual image of what language looks like. They can't really analyze language because the language is gone before they actually hear it, and they have no way of recording it and even if they did they wouldn't want to because it is beyond their basis of cognition to do so. Primary oral people deal with language in a fundamentally different way that literate people. Words have power for primary oral people, and not just individual words but words in particular sequences. Propositions contained within chunks of words and fixed sequences have tremendous power for oral people. For literates it is not these propositional sequences that have power but rather individual words and the ability to manipulate individual words into different patterns and structures. In effect, our view of language, and as a result our view of the world is different from that of orals. It does not mean that we're better, but we are different.

5. How do people in oral cultures remember texts and extensive chunks of language?

One thing noticed by individuals investigating oral societies and their oral events is that oral bards seem to be able to tell extremely long stories. This has often incited people to come to the conclusion that oral beings have better memories than literates. This might be true but we also need to bear in mind that the oral memory may actually work differently than the literate memory. Orals do not remember individual words in isolation as we often do. They remember events or particular instances which are part of a story. They remember them in a particular order because they have associated these types of events to the world around them as well as to particular cues. Oral memory revolves around the physical world, so such things as rhythmic breathing, rhyme, gesture, screaming, and formulaic patterns in the language work to help the oral bard remember the different of events of the story they're trying to tell. And it works. As I mentioned in class, there are oral stories which have been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. Certain oral groups will actually be able to remember and encode their history through stories which may not seem much like a history text. For example, there are North American tribes located one thousand miles inland which have stories of ocean crossings and will even describe in great detail some of the animals in the ocean. These are animals which none of the people in the tribe have actually physically seen for thousands of years, yet they are recorded with great detail in their oral tradition. So, oral memory does work but in a family different way than our own literate memory.

6. What are some of the more important characteristics of orally-based thought and expression?

Ong lists several different characteristics which he thinks are important about oral thought as well as expression. They are: additive, formulaic, redundant, conservative, close to the world, agonistic, homeostatic (in the here and now), and finally situational. Looking through these we can get a feel for what oral culture and oral thought must be like. For us maybe the simplest way to test so these hypotheses is to go to our preliterate children and see how they respond to some of these ideas. Oral culture is primarily additive in that it uses elements from the world around them and adds them together into their type of expressions. So, sounds from nature like the sound of the wind or a particular birdcall are often used in his important part of oral tradition. Oral tradition is formulaic in that patterns are used in order to keep the story going. There are many different types of patterns, from linguistic formulations to patterns in breathing, rhyme scheme, as well as propositional and event patterns. Oral tradition is redundant in that it supplies a lot of detail which is not necessary (from a literate point of view) to the story itself. What we can learn as literates is efficiency in our writing, and even in our speaking eventually, because all this really does rub off on how we use language in general. In oral tradition redundancy is not only allowed its applauded and it is used to heighten the events in the story and to link the events of the story to the world around the listeners so that the right degree of empathy can be created. The listeners in oral tradition are not distant, they are drawn into the story and made to feel part of the story. The events relate to them. The oral tradition is a very conservative tradition in that it does not tolerate that the stories be changed updated or altered. This means that stories are handed down intact from generation to generation and it is not until they are really put into writing that they are able to be messed around with and changed. The oral tradition is also very close to the world and as we've seen before uses ideas from the world around it in order to heighten the experience. They are not stories of distant and faraway places, they are in the here and now even if they are old stories of the past. One surprising thing about oral tradition is how violent and action packed it is. There is no point in telling a story that does not have any kind of event structure, in fact is impossible in oral tradition because it is the event structure which holds the whole story together. So, the events in oral tradition are truly memorable events which reflect violence, and even the violence of the world around them. Oral tradition inspires empathy. The listeners are supposed to be able to understand and feel empathy, but not sympathy, for the characters in the oral recitation. As mentioned above oral tradition is also very much homeostatic as well as situational.

7. How does oral memory differ from textual memory?

I think we have discussed above, more or less, how oral memory differs from textual memory. It is a memory is based on propositions and events and these things are linked in a concrete way to the world around, possibly because different features of the world around events inspire the events. So there's a direct causal relationship between what will happen in the world around it. Textual memory is different. We remember the words in texts. We remember plot lines, but not necessarily the events and certainly the order of the events is not really important as long as the outcome is the same. This is one reason why literates really do not like repetition or redundancy. We're able to see forward in a way that orals are not able to do. It's one thing about our reading process. We predict based on words and events, and primarily words what is going to occur. Once we have worry read something and we already know what's going to occur in the enjoyment is gone.

8. How does the nature of sound affect the oral tradition?

The nature of sound has a profound effect on oral tradition. It is this fleeting nature of sound which makes oral tradition the way it is, or needs to be. Of course as literates we tend to have a very strong opinion about primarily oral societies, and of course our opinions are somewhat pejorative or negative. We see orals is being limited, and they are in relation to what we can to. For them language is like the wind, when it stops it simply ceases to exist. Based on this, primarily oral people do not have a sense of permanence. They can't because nothing is permanent and this shapes their whole tradition.