Social construction of literacy

Recent years have witnessed a rejection of what is now perceived to be an elitist and colonialist kind of literacy. The “primitive” vs. “civilized” dichotomy implied by the theory of the Great Divide between oral cultures and literate cultures is now put in question. This theory was advanced by humanist Eric Havelock, according to it the invention of writing created an irreducible difference between oral and literate cultures and their way of thinking.

Individual literacy has given way to the notion of multiple literacies as a plural set of social practices within social contexts of use. Thus, besides the traditional belletristic literacy, scholars now recognize other sorts of literacies linked to various genres (for example, literary literacy, press literacy, instructional manuals literacy, scientific literacy) that all have to do with the mastery of, or fluent control over, social uses of print language. In this regard, to be literate means not only to be able to encode and decode the written word, or to do exquisite text analyses; it is the capacity to understand and manipulate the social and cultural meanings of print language in thoughts, feelings and actions.

Literacy is not acquired naturally like orality. It is usually learned in school, and has long been confused with schooling. The general educational requirements:

· to narrate events in clearly organized, analytical fashion;

· to construct an argument according to the logic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or problem-evidence-solution;

· to respond to “what” and “why” questions on texts;

· to convey information clearly and succinctly.

In occupations like the service or the marketing industries, or in the writing of novels and poems, other types of literacies required.

Children from different social backgrounds bring to school different types of literacies, not all of which are validated by school literacy practices. For example, in the United States, children from African-American families might display a highly context-embedded, analogic, associative way of telling and writing stories that the school does not recognize as acceptable literate practice, whereas middle-class Anglos might have from home more context-reduced, analytic, hierarchical narrative style that they find reinforced in the way schools teach texts.

The acquisition of literacy is more than a matter of learning a new technology, it is linked to the values, social practices, ways of knowing promoted in educational institutions. It may become the source of cultural conflict when the values of the school do not match those of the home. Such is the case in Alaska and Northern Canada, for example, where the Athabaskans’ ways of learning and knowing are radically different from those of mainstream of Anglo-Canadian and Anglo-American society. Even if they learn to read and write in English, Athabaskan children resist adopting Anglo-Saxon schooling practices that expect them to state their opinion about the text, take a point of view and defend it, display their abilities in front of the class, and speculate about future events – all verbal behaviours that are considered inappropriate in their own culture.

The two perspectives on literacy – as mastery of the written medium and as social practice – correspond to two different ways of viewing a stretch of written language: as text or discourse.

Text and discourse

Text is the product of language use held together by cohesive devices. The notion of text views a stretch of written language as the product of an identifiable authorial intention, and its relation to its context of culture as fixed and table. Text meaning is seen as identical with the semantic signs it is composed of: text explication is used to retrieve the author’s intended meaning, text deconstruction explores the associations evoked by the text. We do not take into consideration either what happens in the minds of the readers nor the social context of reception.

Discourse is the process of language use, whether it be spoken, written or printed, that includes writers, texts, and readers within a sociocultural context of meaning production and reception.

Coherence plays a particularly important role with poetic texts that are meant to engage the reader’s emotions and sensibility, but it can also be found in other written texts. Take, for example, the label found on aspirin bottles.

WARNING: Keep this and all medication out of the reach of childen. As with any drug, if you are pregnant or nursing a baby, seek the advice of a health professional before using this product. In the case of accidental overdosage, contact a physician or poison control centre immediately.

This text is coherent, it makes sense for the reader who knows from prior personal or vicarious experiences that drugs are bad both for children and for pregnant women,who understands the difference between a health professional and a physician, and who understands why you would go to the former if you are pregnant and to the latter if you had taken too much aspirin. In addition to prior experience, the reader makes sense of this text by near electrical wires, places off limits and dangerous substances. However, prior experience and prior texts are not sufficient to render this text coherent. Why is it entitled WARNING where the danger is not explicitly stated? Why should one go and seek help only in case of “accidental” overdose? Why does the text say “overdosage” instead of “overdose”? In order to make the text coherent, we have to draw on the two other contextual factors mentioned above: the text’s purpose, and its conditions of production.

The pharmaceutical company that issued this warning wants to avoid lawsuits, but it also wants to avoid spreading panic among aspirin users, who might thereby refrain from buying a product. Thus it does not like to highlight the word “dangerous” on its bottle, nor does it want to use the word ‘overdose” because of its too close association with the drug traffic scene. It wants to create the image of a reader as an intelligent mainstream person who could not possibly take an overdose of aspirin, unless by accident. The commercial and legal interests, i.e. the corporate culture, of the company have to be drawn into the interpretation of this text, in order to make it into coherent discourse.

One of the greatest sources of difficulty for foreign readers is less the internal cohesion of the text than the cultural coherence of the discourse. For example, a sentence like “ Although he was over 20 years old, he still lived at home” written for an American readership, draws on the readers’ cultural knowledge concerning young men’s independence from their families, but might not be self-evident for readers from a culture where young men continue to live at home well into their twenties. Conversely, a sentence like “I made spaghetti for dinner, because potatoes are so expensive nowadays”, written for a German reader, draws on the cultural fact that many Germans always have potatoes with their meals; it may sound odd to a reader with other cultural habits. The ability of the reader to interpret such logical connections shows how much coherence is dependent on the context of the literacy event itself.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 890