THE PRESENT COMMON SENSE IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE

Ideas around literacy are intimately connected with, and often derived from, theories of language. They, in their turn, can and do come from very many fields: from linguistics of course; but also from psychology, anthropology of certain kinds, literary studies, sociology, media theory, and so on. Given that literacy is very much an applied activity, its practitioners can be highly pragmatic in their uses of theories: they are not in the least bit worried about borrowing eclectically: a bit from here, a bit from over there, and some other bits from somewhere altogether different. The current common sense about language in literacy is an amalgam of forms of anthropology, sociology, literary studies, with strong influences from psychology, media and cultural studies, and in fact with remarkably little contribution from linguistics itself. ‘Phonics’ of course derives from a branch of linguistics, namely phonology and phonetics, but otherwise, linguistics is noticeable largely by its absence.

The focus, generally, in contemporary literacy theory is on use. who does what with it; under what circumstances; for what purposes? What status does literacy have in community x? How are youngsters brought into literacy? What values are attached to it, by whom, under what circumstances? What groups are excluded from literacy, with what effects? These are all questions which concern anthropologists and ethnographers much more than they concern linguists, or even sociologists. In teaching, especially in the upper years of schooling, the effects of literary influence are noticeable—here the questions circle around aesthetic issues, ‘good writing’, matters of style. The influence of media studies is noticeable in the focus on ‘what is done with’ literacy: how do young men and women use certain kinds of texts,

‘popular romance’ for instance, and what do they do with them? While issues such as comprehension, complexity, recall and memory are treated in psychology.

There are two highly significant influences from psychology which it is worth mentioning even if only briefly, namely, the influences of Piaget and of Chomsky. They are, in one sense, related. Both, in different ways, assume a deeply located disposition towards language. In Piaget’s case, much more than language. Human ‘development’ follows a given path which maps pretty well, on the basis of inherent patterns of the human brain, identifiable developmental stages. In Chomsky’s case, language is seen as resting on an innate disposition in human brains towards language, which itself is seen as a highly abstract phenomenon. The evidence, for Chomsky, lies in the fact that all human languages can be learned by any human brain, an ability which he assumes must point to an underlying common organization of the brain. The facility to learn language—in a seemingly regular fashion for children in one language and even across languages— he attributes to what he has called in earlier forms of his theories a Language Acquisition Device, familiarly the LAD.

Remarkably, many or most of the approaches to literacy are characterized by an avoidance of the material itself, the ‘stuff of literacy. It is a little like talking about a house and the building of the house without talking about bricks, walls, concrete, plumbing, electric wiring or window frames. Instead, the talk is all about what the house should do, how it matches the wishes of the new owners, when the sun will come in and where, and so on. Clearly, both perspectives are important, and equally so. Architects have often been accused of not talking enough about these very things; but then no one wants the house to collapse either: no good having the sun come into the right window if in the meantime the roof is starting to cave in.

Ideally a theory of literacy should be based on a theory of language in which what people do with literacy is closely linked to an explanation of what it is ‘made of and how this mode of representation actually works; or, conversely, to explain what is or what is not really possible with this medium, and in this mode. In the preceding chapters I have tried to develop such an approach, where the interest of the maker of texts/messages is the engine which constantly reshapes the very stuff of the representational and communicational mode. Socially and culturally given interests do make us act in certain ways which are not mere accidents but have to do with the structures, purposes and values of the groups in which we lead our lives. My

aim is to develop a theory in which all these concerns can be accommodated in a single integrated approach. As I have attempted to show so far, in the meaning-making practices of children there are a number of underlying and integrating principles at work, which they apply no matter what the stuff is that they are working with in their communicational and representational practices.

There is for me also a political purpose. It concerns the role and status, the ‘standing’ of the child (and indeed, later that of adults) in the processes of representation and communication. If Chomsky’s notion of the LAD is correct, the work of the individual in ‘acquiring’ language is entirely different from the work which I have described. In my view children act energetically, intelligently, perceptively, out of their interest, innovatively making for themselves their means of communication and representation. Yes, they do it with the stuff which their culture has provided for them—this is the force of my examples of the children learning alphabetic and pictographic writing; and yes, they find their logic in those systems, and act transformatively on them. But in the Chomskyan description, the story has already been told, so to speak: the Language Acquisition Device has a structure, which is already there, as part of the brain’s organization, and the child ‘acquires’ language in accordance with this structure—which is the same for all humans. Chomsky’s account is the miracle of the unfolding structure of the brain, a miracle that happens to all humans everywhere, and which leaves language (and the cultural world) as it is. My account is the story of the active engagement of bodily humans with all aspects of their cultural environment, which constantly transforms language, individuals, and their cultural world.

In my story we all get to what seems like the same point—say, we all speak a certain language competently—but the similarity is only partly real, and in part it is apparent. My example of the child’s ‘heavy hill’ (Chapter 1) shows that the use of heavy on this occasion, and its conjunction with hill, was entirely the child’s, and it means that heavy will for him never be exactly what it is for his neighbour at school; and that applies to all linguistic form. In the Chomskyan story the shared structure of the LAD ensures that we end up as we started—largely the same; without much effect from the energetic innovative action of the individual child. In his story, the child’s ‘interest’ (not a term Chomsky would use) would be to do everything possible to aid the unfolding of the structures of the LAD—a structure which is, however, already there.

Both the Piagetian account and that of Chomsky are motivated by a belief in the importance and dignity of human beings; yet both in the end underplay the energetic, interested, intentional action of children in their effects on their world. In each case our attention is focused on a pre-existing schema, and we are asked to look for evidence which shows the unfolding or the appearance of that schema. For me it is much more important to attempt to understand what children are doing out of their interests, actively, with intentions and interested in making their meanings. In the next two chapters I will develop some thoughts on the importance of this approach for curriculum and pedagogy, as well as for much wider social and economic considerations.

Many of the actions and many of the things produced by children that I have and which I have seen elsewhere simply do not match the Piagetian predictions, or their existing descriptions. The pre-existence of the strong theoretical schema holds the danger of blinding researchers to what is actually going on. The real task can become to find what the theorist knows that she or he should find. And unlike Chomsky’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of the social and cultural environment it seems to me simply incontrovertible that children—and adults—make signs whose form can be shown to be their response to that environment. Of course, as I mentioned before, the LAD has no conceivable place for questions of affect.

Two aspects of current theories of language produce particular problems in thinking about and working in literacy; and here I wish to draw attention to both. One is that, with few exceptions, linguistic theories treat language as an autonomous system— autonomous from society in all its various, messy aspects; and autonomous also from individuals as makers of the system of language. Individuals are seen as users of an existing system; not as transformers and remakers of it. This autonomy makes it impossible to see language as social and as historical, as dynamic and as constantly changing in response to different and changing social environments. But it is patently obvious that language changes, with changes in the ‘environment’ in time— over history. One response to that glaring paradox has been to pluralize the term ‘literacy’, and to say that there is a plurality of literacies. This often gets extended to saying that we all have many literacies available to us, to meet the varying demands of social life.

However, this paradox only exists if, in the first place, we assume that language is autonomous, unaffected by the social, and therefore stable. If we assume that language is dynamic because it

is constantly being remade by its users in response to the demands of their social environments, we do not then have a need to invent a plurality of literacies: it is a normal and absolutely fundamental characteristic of language and of literacy to be constantly remade in relation to the needs of the moment; it is neither autonomous or stable, and nor is it a single integrated phenomenon; it is messy and diverse, and not in need of pluralizing.

The second aspect concerns a different kind of pluralization, that is, the extension of the term literacy to other areas, not just of communication, but of general, broad, cultural interest. These ‘literacies’ proliferate: visual, media, cultural, computer, mathematical, emotional, and so on, and so on. The problem stems from a fundamental unwillingness or inability on the part of those who develop these metaphoric extensions of the term as serious concepts, rather than as quick, rhetorically effective uses (or as glib or lazy as with ‘emotional literacy’ and its cousins) to see language as just one of many modes of communication. Because it is seen as the only real mode, as the most highly developed, the one that sustains thought and rationality, all other modes of communication, or for that matter, all cultural systems, have to be described as being a literacy. This devalues the term, so that it comes to mean nothing much more than ‘skill’ (as in keyboard skills) or competence. It also prevents the possibility of examining the actual function of other systems, as systems in their own right.

As I hope my analysis of children’s analytic engagement with print in Chapter 4 shows, literacy is a name for a complex of quite disparate phenomena—print, text as block, letters, text as genre, letters as sound, directionality and spatial dispositions, media, layout. It is in fact no more than a theoretical and ideological convenience to lump all these together as literacy. This is problematic enough. The term becomes more and more problematic the more elements are lumped into the meaning of ‘literacy’. In reading, as I suggested, there is a fundamental question both about boundaries of the unit to be read; and of the limits to reading, of the end to the chain of signs produced in reading. So one can legitimately ask: where does literacy- competence stop? Does it include the ability to conjure up my nostalgic memories of Bondi Beach from a ‘reading’ of the ‘Seagulls’ print? Does a ‘proper aesthetic response’ to a literary text form part of a fully developed literacy competence?

WHAT IS LITERACY? UNRAVELLING