Re: Reading to children (Re-

Geoffrey Williams (geoffrey.williams who-is-at english.su.edu.au)
15 Dec 1995 19:00:04 U

To take up some of Robert Veel's points a little further, when children come
into school and engage in j b-r and related literacy activities, what meanings
do they understand it to be relevant to produce in this type of context? Or,
what does it take to be a "good subject" in this pedagogic discourse? For
example, is it or is it not relevant, in talking about a fictive text, to also
talk about personal experience? Under what conditions? Why is it/is it not
relevant to do so? Or is it important to be able to give a justification for
a previously articulated answer? What counts as acceptable "justification?
What can you expect as a young learner if you get it wrong? Does one
typically modalise one's ideas, or (perhaps) not? There are many more such
questions.

Is there diversity intra-culturally in these practices? It appears to be so.
Then, do the principles regulating the relevance of (possible) diverse
practices also relate to other regulating principles (such as the construction
of individuation/ similarity etc) in family interaction? How do these
relations in turn link to typical school practices? Bernstein's discussion of
different "orders of relevance of meanings" in different social and
institutional locations seems useful, partly because it doesn't involve an
assumption of some order of relevance being qualitatively "better" than some
other one, but equally importantly it enables a definition of locations in
social class relations to be articulated in terms which predict the bases for
different orders of relevance of meanings to develop, and to be differentially
privileged by schooling.

Robert asked me to comment a bit further on specific results from my study.
It suggested, in common with many others but on the basis of multiple clause
by clause analyses of about 450 pages of family and classroom transcripts,
that people in different social locations do typically and habitually adopt
different orders of relevance of meaning in j b-reading. There are, of
course, many similarites between the social groups as well as important
differences. (If there were only differences, how would misrecognition be
possible?) It is middle-class interactive practice which is very closely
associated with typical school practice in Kindergarten whatever the
socio-geographical location of the school. (The m-c practice was typically an
amplification of school practice.) The ensuing question is: is this because
one set of parents are "better educated" or "have a higher income" or SES, or
are part of a different community "literate tradition", or for some other
reason? Level of family income is obviously not irrelevant - it's just that
it seems an insufficiently robust and very indirect signifier for the complex
sets of social relations which give rise to the differential/ differentiating
literate practices. Hence the use of Bernstein's arguments about
specialization of different forms of communicative practices in relation to
labour categories, formally defined through classification/framing relations.

This is, of course, in some ways to revisit the Uzbekhi/ Vai questions but in
this study in relation to intra-cultural relations, and with different
theoretical and methodological frames. (Mike, if you've persisted this far
and on a personal note, I found the revised discussion of Vai literacy with
Jack Goody in -The interface between the written and the oral- enormously
helpful in this work. Thanks.)
Geoff