Coulmas Handbook of Sociolinguistics / Part 2 - Social dimensions of Language / part 2 - 10. Spoken and Written Language

10. Spoken and Written Language : The Handbook of Sociolinguistics : Blackwell ... Page 11 of 12

discourse and context and their relationship. The “discoursing” of the social science disciplines has made the discussion of such a widely used term difficult to define. But despite the saturation of (and by) the academic community with this term, there has been little explicit work which focuses on the oral/literate mix in specific settings. Discourse in Foucaultian perspective as the complex of signs and practices structured through power relations to control our lives, or discourse as cultural capital within a market economy (Bourdieu, 1977,1991), is represented at a level of abstraction which ignores the oral/written debate. Although Foucault and Bourdieu are concerned with the relationship between everyday practices and sociohistorical and economic conditions which shape them, there is no accounting for how these day-to-day practices come about.

At the other end of the spectrum, concern with the linguistic forms of discourse (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975; Stubbs, 1983) or with the mechanisms of conversation which instantiate the practical reasoning ability of social actors (as in conversational analysis) limits analysis of social events to observed phenomena, focuses on talk rather than literacy/oracy events, and is not connected to the wider sociopolitical process. An interim position is taken by the critical linguists (Fowler, Hodge, and Kress, 1979; Fairclough, 1989) who relate linguistic processes to wider discourse formations, but still tend to read from specific texts to these wider discourses, rather than situating more ethnographic contextually sensitive accounts within the wider frame of knowledge/power relations which Foucault's definition of discourse argues for.

In this perspective, issues of what counts as literacy, for example, the free expression of the seventies classroom or the formal grammar of the nineties in western schooling, and what counts as oracy, again the storytelling, autobiographical accounts of 20 years ago or the specific schooled competences of the eighties and nineties, are the product of the dominant discourses of these times rather than any enlightened, liberated or realistic assessment of students’educational priorities. Changes in information technology and how they affect what we think of as oral/written discourse are also currently being researched, with reference, for instance, to dialogue processes in computermediated communication (Eklundh, 1986), to the uses of e-mail (Cole, 1985), and the relationship between text and talk in televisual forms, all of which may be treated as an issue of power/knowledge and identity, rather than just of technical progress (Gill, 1986).

Speaking and writing and their interrelationships are located within this wider conceptualization of discourse but are also experienced and acted out in specific local contexts. Recent work on contextualization (Gumperz, 1982a, b; Duranti and Goodwin, 1991; Auer and di Luzio, 1992) focuses on the connection between what is “brought about” and what is “brought along” in an event (Giddens, 1976; Hinnenkamp, 1989). In other words there is the contextual work done by participants in an event which actively creates context (McDermott, 1974; Erickson, 1975), the “brought about.” There are contextual parameters which cannot be changed but which can be brought into focus or not (the brought along) and there are contextual schema which are brought along but subject to negotiation (Auer, 1992). More specifically, Gumperz's notion of “contextualization cues” channels semantic information into a message which in turn indexes sets of discourses and interactional experiences, which in Silverstein's (1992) term become part of “contextual reality.” How this contextualization works and is differentially used and evaluated in settings where power relations are in focus is the subject of much of Gumperz's work and allies his approach to Bourdieu's concept of the linguistic marketplace, where linguistic and so symbolic resources are differentially distributed. What seems to be lacking still is sufficient ethnographic research which draws on this approach to context, sets the situated processes of writers and speakers within a wider critical perspective, and asks how these practices come to be produced and given value (or not).

10 Conclusion

Great claims have been made for “literacy” in its autonomous form. The term “literacy” itself set up and served to perpetuate the assumed differences between spoken and written language. Once essential differences between oracy and literacy were staked out, they could be unpacked from their communicative contexts and presented, paradoxically, both as a neutral set of skills to be acquired, and in the case of literacy and standard oral varieties, a value-laden and undifferentiated force for development and/or national integration.

Recent ethnographic research on oral and written language and on literacies has consistently argued

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10. Spoken and Written Language : The Handbook of Sociolinguistics : Blackwell ... Page 12 of 12

that these social practices are complex, dynamic, and contextually specific. Oracies and literacies do not function independently of each other, or of wider sets of knowledge, or of profound issues of identity and social legitimation. Nor does literacy function in any simple way to create and maintain institutions and nation-states. Such functionalism ignores both the variety of routes through which groups come to be structured and controlled and the issues of power and authority.

Ideological and critical models of spoken and written language challenge this functionalism by raising questions about how the role and uses of literacy came to be defined in the way they are traditionally accepted. Such a challenge is particularly evident and significant within education where cultural capital is differentially distributed.

Illiteracy as stigma or literacy as development are not, as recent research has shown, claims that can be substantiated. But ethnographic studies in school and community, the charting of resistance to imposed literacy norms, and the devaluation of speaking practices, all illustrate the claims that can be made for the complex communicative practices which draw on written and spoken resources. These practices, studied within an ethnographic and historical tradition, both prescribe what counts as worthwhile within the dominant discourse and express the creativity of communities in resisting it. As such they are central to our understanding of the relationship between language and society.

Cite this article

ROBERTS, CELIA and BRIAN STREET. "Spoken and Written Language." The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Coulmas, Florian (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 1998. Blackwell Reference Online. 28 December 2007 <http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode? id=g9780631211938_chunk_g978063121193812>

Bibliographic Details

The Handbook of Sociolinguistics

Edited by: Florian Coulmas eISBN: 9780631211938

Print publication date: 1998

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