Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Reading

Week 7 - Answers

Ong, Chapters 4

1.How is it that writing restructures consciousness?

The idea that writing restructures consciousness is reliant on the belief that language and cognition are deeply entwined. The basic idea behind this is that once we learn the basic communicative function of language and reuse language in a daily basis we then actually will shift into more cognitive forms of language wherein language and cognition become more or less synonymous, at least for a period of time. Writing, as a technological extension of language, is able to affect consciousness simply because it allows us to distance ourselves cognitively from a situation. The real power of writing is its distancing effect which allows us to stop, step back and analyze. Initially of course what writing will actually allow us to analyze is language itself. The analysis of language is something which we know that orals cannot do simply because language is fleeting. There are very strict restrictions on how long the short-term memory can actually hold information and in which ways it can process this information it holds. This simple fact makes it impossible for oral people to be able to analyze language the same way we as literates do. So, the basic power of writing is its ability to freeze something in time for analysis. Writing works as a kind of artificial long-term memory. Once we can begin to analyze language then we begin to analyze everything around us. We can use writing to freeze the world so to speak. We can take a part of the world and freeze it in writing so that may be analyzed. This allows people to form a different type a relationship with the world itself and even with concepts like time such as the past; one in which they are not directly involved. It also allows them to be a plan for the future in a concrete way. By doing this it allows literates to view the world in a fundamentally different way than orals. What writing really allows us to do is to control the world because we can finally make concrete plans and concrete observations which don't change.

2. How does writing relate to context?

The relationship between writing and context is less straightforward and in being so tenuous contrasts very strongly with the relationship between speaking and context. Speaking basically occurs as a response to a specific context. Once more, this response needs to be immediate. If the response isn't immediate people simply won't remember what someone is responding to. This of course is also restricted by short-term memory. Writing is fundamentally different in that in writing there is no context that the writer is responding to, at least not one that is there any immediate vicinity of time and location. Certainly writing occurs as a response to something but that response is invariably delayed to the point where it cannot be called a reaction. So what the writer needs to do is create a context both for themselves and for their readership. In a speaking situation the speaker and listener share the context because they're in the same place. They share the same situation abd because of he nature of speakig will constantly change roles. In writing this is simply not the case and this is the power of writing, but it also means the writers must be able to create context. Readers, and this is what truly interest us, need to be able to get that context (extrapolate the context) from the text they're reading. Once more, readers need to be able to react to this imaginary context.

The differences in context also mean that spoken and written language need to be structured differently. We're already said that in oral cultures there seems to be a much smaller number of overall lexical items that are used. This of course can occur due to the idea that spoken language only occurs in situational context so people will be able to understand the words without extensive elaboration. This means the words do not have to have a meaning as fixed as they might be seen in writing, and in fact they don't, not even in writing. Situational context lets words mean almost anything by extension. The context inherent in speaking loads the words with extra or divergent meanings. In writing this is not necessarily the case because the situation might have been created by the writer but it's never going to be as well developed or as clear as the situation in a speaking context. In writing what writers really fall back on, structurally speaking, is linguistic context. Because the reader is able to analyze the language and, if necessary, go back and we read a certain section, the language of writing can be much more complex. Word meaning tends to be much more fixed. That is the nature of writing, it fixes things. It renders things permanent, including word meaning.

3. Why was the alphabet developed late and only once, according to Ong?

The answer here is simple. The alphabet was developed late within the development of writing as a whole and especially in relation to language and possibly only once for the basic reason that the alphabet involves a very high level of abstraction. This high level of abstraction requires a very deep analysis of the structure of the language in question. This would require a certain level of literacy not just on a personal level but on a societal level. It obviously took human society a very long time to reach this position and it took the ancient Greek society, a society run on the back of slave labor, to make this discovery as fully as it did and even this was a matter of happenstance in relation to the structure of the Greek language as compared to its eastern neighbors. To a certain extent the invention of writing, like so many other inventions, was a kind of mishap. Greek society at the time happened to have a group of upper echelon rich guys who had nothing really to do. They also had a language which had a very high level of inflectional morphology which means the structure of the language was not very well suited to a syllabiary, which is what the languages around them were doing and which were all well suited for a syllabiary due to their structure. So the invention of the full alphabet was really based on the fact that both Greek society and the Greek language had the right structure. Ong surmises that the alphabet was really only invented once because it requires such a high level of abstraction is hard to imagine the other societies would have come up with the alphabet. Even Korean society which we know has probably the most famous alphabet in the world undoubtedly knew about the existence of alphabetic writing before they invented their highly scientific alphabet. Certainly alphabetic writing existed all around the Korean peninsula at the time and previous to that time.

4. How does the long path of development of writing as a societal norm underscore differences between spoken and written systems?

As mentioned above writing has taken a very long time to develop not only as a basic technology, but even more importantly as a societal norm. It is really only the last 100 may be 150 years that writing has really become a part of societies. This seems to have occurred despite the fact that writing has actually been around for more than 6000 years. Writing as a societal norm, then, has really followed a very long and tenuous path of development. It certainly makes sense for us taken with this and see why this might have been so. Well, the first observation we can make is that writing must actually be a pretty hard thing. It must not be very natural and in fact we know it's not. If we couldn't speak and only write society would probably shut down as we know it. So, writing even today is still less important than speaking although its importance has undoubtedly expanded tremendously into the point where we couldn't really imagine society without writing either. But the bottom line is if you had to lose one or the other (speaking or writing) I am sure most people would chose to lose their ability to write over their ability to speak.

So, writing is unnatural. Writing is difficult. Writing takes time and energy. This means that writing did not change society really very fast. There was no massive explosion of human society after writing was invented. Society changed pretty slowly and with a lot of ups and downs. Before writing could be useful, truly useful, society had to develop to a specific level which made writing necessary. For most of our history into the very recent past writing has not been necessary. We didn't need it. Maybe it was nice to have. It was a cool kind of magic trick, but it wasn't really necessary for most people. When other technology was developed which freed up our time and allowed society to become much more complex only then did writing became necessary and, not coincidentally, schooling was developed as a societal norm. The history of writing and history of formal national education go hand-in-hand.

For us as teachers what this tells us is that any kind of literacy development we do with our students must be needs driven. If we are to follow or derive any lessons from our history and the history of human society at large, then we need to make the observation that writing is a tool which is only used when necessary. To force people to learn and use a tool when they don't need it doesn't make any sense. This means that we have to create purposes and real purposes for why our students need to read in English.

5. What is a grapholect and what is the basis of its power?

A grapholect is nothing more than a specific dialect from a language group which is taken and committed to writing and as a result becomes a written and later may be even possibly a spoken norm. So the form of English in which English speakers write was originally simply taken from the London dialect and has become an international norm for English writing and may even eventually become the norm for English-speaking (some at least) as odd as that may seem. All languages with written systems have a grapholect. Often the grapholect correlates to a high prestige dialect or sometimes it has been created as a conglomeration of all the different dialects but doesn't actually correlate strongly to any one dialect. The development of grapholects can be traced back to the development of the printing press. It was at the moment of the printing press` creation that national standards or norms for language groups needed to be created. The reasons for this were purley economic. Printers wanted to make as much money as they could from the books they printed. As a result they tried to publish the books in the dialect which was readable to his many people as possible within their language group (remember, this was way before the advent of public education so only small numbers of people were able to read the books, much less afford them). This involved creating what we now call grapholects. The real power of a grapholect is its universal appeal. If we take Korean as a simple example, there is a Korean grapholect which enables people across several provisional and national borders, who actually speak quite different dialects, to be able to contact and communicate with each other without difficulty. So, someone here in South Korea who writes a book or a note or anything like that and sends it to Korean speaking communities in China or North Korea or Australia for that matter would expect other Koreans to be able to read it no problem and this is the case. The Korean grapholect allows Koreans all over the world to communicate with each other with ease and with full comprehension. That is the true power of the grapholect in that it provides people with a neutral voice in which to write. Grapholects promote normalcy and more distance from the language that we actually speak. The real truth is that for today`s grapholects (many of which were coded long ago) no one really speaks them. When a child learns a grapholect at home or in school they are learning a code different from the way they speak. This is a crucial point.

Ong - Closing Comments

This week we put an end to all this orthography clamor and bid a fond farewell to the more theoretical part of this course. At this point it is important that we draw some kind of closure to the last few weeks of this class by coming to some sort of conclusions about what Ong and others have pointed out about orality and all the things we have studied about writing systems. One of the most important things to remember is that reading and writing are artificial. They're not natural in the same way speaking and listening are. True, they are extensions of language but they are unnatural extensions of language. Literacy is an invention, it is technology which was invented to make language permanent. Our position is somewhat strange in that we aren't wholly integrated into this technology and as such are probably not able to really see the affect the technology has had. For this reason I really wanted us to take a look, to take a giant step back, and find out what literacy is really about.

Spoken language is primary and natural. Literacy (reading/writing) is secondary and artificial. Nobody can teach language. Only language can teach language. However, literacy is a skill which can be taught. In fact, for most students it must be taught but on top of and with the use of the code they already know (speaking). Maybe one of the big problems in foreign language teaching is that teachers are simply too literate. They have no oral side from which to build onto. Maybe we should have children teaching language, but could they teach language the way we expect people to teach language? That is the burning question. Simply put, spoken code in foreign languages are never actually taught. It is not language that is taught in the foreign language, it is literacy. What we find in Ong, especially in chapter 4, is that oral language and written language have different forms, and even follow different rules or sets of rules. I'm not expounding only about the differences between speaking and writing here, because once somebody has learned to write it actually affects their speaking. What I'm talking about the differences between oral-based language and literate-based language. One striking contrast which Ong makes in his book is the difference between the vocabularies that are used in oral vs. literate societies. Oral societies seem to be able to get by with roughly 5000 words, while literate societies have vocabularies which reach into the millions. This tremendous vocabulary is made possible to the development of literacy. This is just the beginning of the differences, which have been noticed for a long time. The evidence of this is the fact that linguists, since the early 1900s have, as case in point, often refused to analyze written texts. But the problem here is that the oral language and the way they do analyze the oral language is reliant upon literacy.

If we begin to analyze the true differences between orality and literacy we find even more striking differences linguistically. In an oral society, words do not have fixed meanings. Yes, many have a core meaning, but this is by no means fixed and words, all words, have literally hundreds of different meaning possibilities all depending on context. The same holds true for grammar rules. Knowledge of grammar only comes with literacy. People in primarily oral societies have no clue about grammar. They can't because language for them is fleeting. There's no way for them to analyze any kind of language. It is NOT that native speakers have magically internalized rules and can use them without thinking about them. It is that there are no rules in relation to language. There can`t be any rules without a literate mind. All our theories about language and how it works are grounded in literacy, but literacy is a foreign element to language. We learn our language first through orality. Literacy certainly can be a serious hindrance to (foreign) language learning What we need to think about is whether literacy is a good thing or bad thing in relation to language learning for certain people and at certain stages. Certainly, thinking about the structure of the mind, and the memory system which we talked a little bit about in this last class, we find that the brain is clearly designed for spoken language and not for written language.

Now, there is no doubt that orality is primary. Literacy is an abstraction, an extension of orality. One of the most serious problems we encounter is language teachers is the fact that our students receive absolutely no real experience or training in the oral nature of their foreign language. From what I can see virtually all foreign language study is geared and focused and regulated through literate systems. As a result we wind up with students who have no idea how the target language actually works. They have a highly distance extremely fixed view of the language, which contrasts strongly with their view of their own first language and heightens all the tremendous differences between first language and foreign language acquisition. When we add in the further dimension of tremendous social distance, not to mention physical and historical distance, such as the case between Korean and English then we wind up with a really kind of nasty relationship and formula for the problems of language teaching, or at least the totally ineffective nature of language teaching. Simply put, we are putting the horse before the cart in language teaching in general.

Literacy is good. Literacy is necessary. Literacy, however, is not the beginning and cannot be the beginning or the whole. Literacy must come as a development following primary oral development in a language. No matter who we are teaching, and by this I mean age group and level, we need to try to expose them to the fundamentally oral nature of language.