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Literacy event, prior text, point of view

The interaction of a reader with texts of any kind has been called a literacy event. Literacy events are defined by their members’ common social practices with written language (e.g. reading/writing/talking about family letters, attending/reciting religious services, attending/performing poetry readings, delivering/listening to scripted professional speeches, reading/writing scientific articles) and common ways of interpreting these practices.

The knowledge that goes into literacy event draws on the larger cultural and historical context of production and reception of texts in a particular discourse community.

The situational context includes:

· The events captured in the propositional content.

· The intended audience: what knowledge, values, interests, beliefs does the text assumes it shares with its readers? How does the text position its audience and itself?

· The text’s purpose: it says something about the world (propositional and locutionary value) and performs an action (describe, inform, query, complain – illocutionary value). Every text attempts to have a cognitive and emotional effect on its readers, or to prompt its readers to action (perlocutionary value).

· The text’s register, or functional language variation.

· Its key: every text bears the mark of the narrator’s stance – e.g., ironic, humorous, or factual as to the facts related.

· Prior texts

· Point of view: spatio-temporal (physical context that the narrator refers to), psychological (omniscient or limited), ideological (system of beliefs, values, and categories).

 

Genre

Genre is a socially-sanctioned type of communicative event, either spoken (interview, sermon, joke, lecture) or printed (novel, press report, political manifesto). It is viewed as a universal type, fixed by literary and other conventions. But in sociocultural perspective genre is always dependent on being perceived within a specific context of situation or culture.

The concept of genre is related to text type and language choice.

There are striking differences between French and Anglo-Saxon genre “research paper”. Anglo-Saxon scientists have to legitimize their research by displaying in the first paragraph all extant research on the same topic and showing how their own fills a neglected gap. By contrast, French scientific articles draw their legitimation from the status and affiliation of the researcher, and their work in the field; French scientists find the initial review of the literature rather futile. Unlike their French counterparts, Anglo-Saxon scientists have to make explicit their adherence to a recognizable school, disciplinary tradition, or theoretical orientation; French scientists prefer their research to stand on its own merits. Whereas American research articles end with the obligatory discussion of “the limitations of the study”, French articles do not such thing; instead, they are obligated to raise larger questions, and point to directions for further areas of study. These two different styles within two scientific communities that otherwise share the same purpose may create difficulties.



The concept of text type establishes constraints on what one is expected to write about, in what form, for what audience. Religious leaders in some cultures, like Shi’a Islam, make a difference between texts that tell the truth, e.g., the sacred text of Qur’an, and those that lie, such as poetry. Narrative irony, as found in the Western novel, is not a familiar text feature in a culture that expects narrative truths to be identical to real-life truth. Those who use novelistic irony and fiction to criticize Islamic practices, like Salman Rushdie did, are read at face-value and condemned by those who have authority to be the textual gate-keeper of their culture.

 

Summary

The advent of writing and the invention of printing have radically changed the relation and culture. The maintenance of historical tradition, the control of collective memory, the authority to interpret events have all been enhanced by the written medium. Thus textual culture has become the dominant culture of research and scholarship.

There are two ways of looking at written language: as a fixed and stable product (text); as interactive highly inferential process between a text and its readers (discourse).

 

 


Date: 2015-12-18; view: 917


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