Text 15

Walter J. Ong: Orality and Literacy. Methuen 1982, pages 175, 178, 179.

The oral language can be seen as primary in that it develops naturally both in the life of the individual (ontogenetically) and in the history of humankind (phylogenetically); but writing, Ong argues, has forever changed the way human beings think and act in the world. Even people who don't know how to read nor write are affected by modes of thought brought about by the technology of writing.

The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.

…

To say that a great many changes in the psyche and in culture connect with the passage from orality to writing is not to make writing (and/or its sequel, print) the sole cause of all the changes. The connection is not a matter of reductionism but of relationism. The shift from orality to writing intimately interrelates with more psychic and social developments than we have yet noted. Developments in food production, in trade, in political organization, in religious institutions, in technological skills, in educational practices, in means of transportation, in family organization, and in other areas of human life all play their own distinctive roles. But most of these developments, and indeed very likely every one of them, have themselves been affected, often at great depth, by the shift from orality to literacy and beyond, as many of them have in turn affected this shift.

• What does Walter Ong mean by the statement: 'Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well'?

• Some scholars have pointed out that it is not writing per se that is 'consciousness-raising', especially under certain school conditions, but only certain uses of writing. Under what conditions can writing intensify a person's sense of self?

Text 16

H. G. Widdowson: 'The realization of rules in written discourse' in Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press 1984, page 39.

Literacy can intensify a sense of self only if written texts are put in relation with readers' selves, i.e. if they are read not just as linguistic products but as discourse.

Reading is most commonly characterized as an exercise in linguistic analysis, an activity whereby information is extracted from a written text which signals it. The information is thought to be there, statically residing in the text and in principle recoverable in its entirety. If, in practice, the reader cannot recover the information it is assumed that he is defective in linguistic competence. Such a view represents written language as the manifestation of syntactic and semantic rules and the reader's task as a matter of recognition. I want to propose an alternative view: one which represents written text as a set of directions for conducting an interaction. From such an interaction, which in effect creates discourse from text, the reader derives what information he needs, or what information his current state of knowledge enables him to take in. Meanings, in this view, are not contained in a text but are derived from the discourse that is created from it, and since this will be determined by such factors as limitation of knowledge and purpose in reading, these meanings can never be complete or precise. They are approximations. What I want to propose, then, is an approach to reading which focuses on the procedures which the language user employs in making sense of written communication.

• Can you think of other factors that determine which discourse is created by readers from a text, besides 'limitation of knowledge and purpose in reading'?

• In Text 8, Malinoivski demonstrates how 'linguistic data' alone cannot lead to an understanding of spoken language use. How far is this consistent with what Widdowson says here about written language?