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- The Open University (OU)
Lecture notes of 30 pages for the course Learning and teaching in primary education at OU (Study topic notes)
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Study Topic 15: Language and LiteracyLiteracy is more than simply learning the alphabet and the printed word; it is about gaining
access to a wider world, too.
The aims of Study Topic 15 are to:
1. investigate some of the many dimensions of language and literacy.
2. explore ways in which children become literate.
3. examine ways of integrating technology into literacy teaching and learning.
What is literacy?
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more things that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
(Dr Seuss, 1978)
Do you know an adult who cannot read? What do you think they have missed? In Michael
Morpurgo’s (1997) book, Farm Boy, a grandfather catches up on missed schooling and gets
his grandson to teach him to read and write. This enables the grandfather to write down
stories about his childhood for his grandson to enjoy.
What does literacy mean to you? When we begin to look at the processes of reading and
writing in detail, and the many purposes that literacy can serve, then it begins to look rather
complex. Many everyday transactions and activities involve literacy. A lot of written texts
are delivered by post, from personal letters and formal documents of high importance, for
example, to brochures, catalogues and ‘junk’ mail. Increasingly, your written texts may be
delivered by SMS to your mobile phone or by email. To illustrate the diversity of literacy,
this first activity asks you to collect some evidence of literacy in your own home.
Activity 15.1 Literacy in your home
Task 1: Choose two or three rooms in your home where you spend the most time. In each
room, make a note of anything you see that involves reading or writing. We would expect
you to accumulate quite a long list, so take your time and don’t dismiss anything, no matter
how small.
Task 2: When you have completed Task 1, consider the following questions and make notes
in the box below.
Can you identify a purpose for each item?
, Are there some items that you hadn’t originally considered to be connected
with ‘literacy’?
Are there items that show your household’s links with the outside world?
Are there items that you would consider ‘cultural’?
Are there some that are more accessible to some people than others?
Are there items that you would not have found five or ten years ago?
Where did you learn to read each type of text – was it at school or in some
other context?
Comment
You probably looked first for things that are read (books, newspapers, etc.). If a television
was on, there may have been text on screen; for example, the ‘Breaking news’ text banner
used by many news channels. And if you could see a computer, you may have noticed web
pages on which words, images and animation work together.
1.1 The boundaries of literacy
Most texts arise from particular cultures and often have a characteristic way of representing
and creating events and experiences. Books of all kinds spring out of our literate culture, as
do scripts for plays, films and television. Over time, our knowledge of different genres
(literary or artistic styles) develops and becomes part of our understanding; for example, we
know how to identify whether a book or a story is a romance or an adventure, and whether
or not we want to read it.
The boundaries of literacy are not obvious: if you choose one water tap over the other
because it has a red dot on it, you are interpreting a conventional sign (red for hot) but are
you reading? If you identify a book that you have started reading as a romance, that is a
literacy skill; but if you use the same skill to spot the genre of a film (e.g. horror), is that a
kind of literacy, too?
We read and create our own texts on the screens of televisions, computers, mobile phones
and other handheld devices. Literacy in these areas includes skills we probably didn’t learn
at school. Mobile phones, for example, enable us to talk, text, record and transmit sounds
and images, and to take photographs.
Literacy connects us to our culture and society. The child’s drawing above reminds us that
children learn about literacy practices from the world around them. Learning about literacy
at school is only one part of children’s experience of literacy. Through the use of mobile and
digital technologies, we are able to keep in touch with friends across the globe, share news
articles and messages instantly, and make use of free translation facilities when needed. In
fact, we are now writing to each other more than ever before.
In 2002, Emma Passmore won a competition in The Guardian newspaper with her poem
written using the kind of abbreviations commonly used in text messages at the time. This
was her winning entry:
, I left my pictur on th ground wher u walk
so that somday if th sun was jst right
& th rain didnt wash me awa
u might c me out of th corner of yr i & pic me up
(Passmore, quoted in Keegan, 2002)
The poet-laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, believes that ‘The poem is a form of texting … . It’s a
perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is’
(Duffy, quoted in Moorhead, 2011). The advent of smart phones, with their touchscreens
and predictive text, means that the process of texting has become faster and there is less
need to shorten words and make up new texting ones. Nevertheless, when sending a text,
many people still use a less formal style of writing than they would use in other contexts,
and this often includes abbreviations and ‘emoji’ (small digital images used to express
emotions or ideas).
Activity 15.2 Emoji
Task 1: Read this news article by linguist Neil Cohn, which discusses whether emoji can be
considered to be an emerging language.
When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or
enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear
along with speech. Over the past three decades, research
has shown that our hands provide important information
that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech.
Emoji serve this function too.
This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural
language ever limited to speech alone. When we are
speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we
mean. For this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-
modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-verbal
information, but emoji may allow us to re-incorporate it into
our text.
A grammatical system is a set of constraints that governs
how the meaning of an utterance is packaged in a coherent
way. Natural language grammars have certain traits that
distinguish them. In addition, grammars are made up of
groupings of units. When emoji are isolated, they are
primarily governed by simple rules related to meaning
alone, without these more complex rules.
In all cases, the doer of the action (the agent) precedes the
action. In fact, this pattern is commonly found in both full
languages and simple communication systems. For example,
the majority of the world’s languages place the subject
before the verb of a sentence.
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