Jay's description reminds me of a mind blowing (to me, at least)
incident in my research in (what I called then) and oral/aliterate
community.
A girl, third or fourth grade, was showing off her ability to read a
page of text to me. She "read" the text word for word except that she
changed EVERY instance of grammar to conform to her own community's
speech patterns. The part that amazed me at the time was her fluent
consistency in making the translation from the written "prompt" to what
she "knew" as the correct meaning.
Now I'm looking at document prompts in (oral) workplace team
environments. I wonder if I'm seeing the same sort of thing. Hmmmmm....
dale
Jay Lemke wrote:
>
> It was fun reading all those fractured orthographies ... and the
> discussion of how, depending on language and writing system, we read by
> combining "bottom up" (orthographic-phonological) and "top-down" (genre,
> register, discourse, intertextual) strategies.
>
> Perhaps also worth noting that how we learn to read, how we read
> initially unfamiliar words and text, and how we read after long practice
> and on familiar ground, are all pretty obviously very different
> practices, including at the neurological level. No doubt also somewhat
> different depending on language and writing system, and on schooled
> practices and some aspects of the general culture of reading (e.g. its
> relation to an oral tradition, the sacredness of texts, the cultural
> salience of accuracy, etc.).
>
> I happen to be teaching a course at the moment that deals with changing
> definitions of literacy, reading, writing, etc. and in part with what it
> means to read something that counts as writing. An interesting thought
> in this vein is that "a reading" of a text has not historically always,
> or perhaps even most often, meant a verbatim recitation word-for-word,
> but rather a performance that counts in a community as rendering the
> culturally important aspects of the meaning of the text, even when we
> have to fill in words not there, gloss as we read, correct errors in
> print, interpret ambiguities, and make a "good reading", regardless of
> the marks on the page.
>
> Roy Harris (Oxford, linguistics), who has perhaps thought and written
> more on these matters than anyone in the last decade or two (Signs of
> Writing is the best of his books on the subject, I think) makes a very
> good case that in general writing is NOT a notation of speech, but
> rather a prompt that we use to produce a good performance of the sense
> of the text. At the moment, and in some quarters of one culture, "good"
> has come to mean a rather limited and literalist verbatim-ism. I think
> there are excellent reasons to reject that "fundamentalist" position as
> naive and limiting intellectually. It has, unfortunately, made common
> cause with both religious textual fundamentalism (Christian mainly, I
> don't know about Muslim) and with the politics of recent linguistics,
> which turned away from a view of the autonomy of written language to a
> fetishism of oral language as fundamental. Harris knows that history
> very well and points to the blinders it has put on our current view of
> literacy. (For the links to religious textualism, see David Olson's _The
> World on Paper_.)
>
> I don't think one can properly pose questions about the relationship
> between orthographic-phonological and discursive-semantic reading
> practices outside some fairly sophisticated view of what defines "a
> reading" of a text in a particular community for a particular purpose.
> Sometimes writing is a notation for speech. But not usually.
>
> JAY.
>
>
>
>
> At 06:10 PM 9/19/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> I just don't get it. I tried scrambling the following abstract and it
>> did not
>> help to make sense of it at all:
>>
>> "Txet-only CMC has been cialmed to be iiaecotrtalnlny inenocerht due to
>> laitnomtiis imeposd by mengiassg sstymes on trun-tnkaig and rfceeenre,
>> yet
>> its ptploauriy cotniunes to grow. In an amtetpt to roeslve this aapnrpet
>> pdaraox, this sutdy evueaatls the cerechone of ctpouemr-meaitedd
>> itocaienrtn
>> by sivruenyg resaecrh on csors-turn cronechee. The rteslus revael a high
>> deerge of dtseirpud adjenaccy, ovalepnpirg egnhxaecs, and tpioc dcaey.
>> Two
>> eitnopalxans are ppsrooed to aocucnt for the prtiplouay of CMC diepste
>> its
>> rlateive iecreconhne: the atbliiy of usres to aapdt to the miuedm, and
>> the
>> aaevtngads of lonoseed cochneree for hgeeenthid itaetiicvntry and
>> luagnage
>> paly."
>
>
>
> Jay Lemke
> Professor
> University of Michigan
> School of Education
> 610 East University
> Ann Arbor, MI 48104
>
> Tel. 734-763-9276
> Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
> Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
-- Dale Cyphert, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Management University of Northern Iowa 1227 W.27th Street Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0125 (319) 273-6150 dale.cyphert@uni.edu
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