The contributors—teachers of French, German, Greek, Japanese, and Spanish—call for language teachers and theorists to refocus on the importance of reading skills. Emphasizing the process of reading as analyzing and understanding another culture, they document various practical methods, including the use of computer technology for enhancing language learning and fostering cross-cultural understanding.
The contributors—teachers of French, German, Greek, Japanese, and Spanish—call for language teachers and theorists to refocus on the importance of reading skills. Emphasizing the process of reading as analyzing and understanding another culture, they document various practical methods, including the use of computer technology for enhancing language learning and fostering cross-cultural understanding.
Reading Between the Lines: Perspectives on Foreign Language Literacy
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Reading Between the Lines: Perspectives on Foreign Language Literacy
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Overview
The contributors—teachers of French, German, Greek, Japanese, and Spanish—call for language teachers and theorists to refocus on the importance of reading skills. Emphasizing the process of reading as analyzing and understanding another culture, they document various practical methods, including the use of computer technology for enhancing language learning and fostering cross-cultural understanding.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300097818 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2003 |
| Series: | Yale Language Series |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Reading Between the Lines
PERSPECTIVES ON FOREIGN LANGUAGE LITERACYYale University Press
Copyright © 2003 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-300-09781-6
Chapter One
Reading Cultures and EducationWILLIAM A. JOHNSON
In this essay I wish to invite reflection on reading or, more precisely, on reading culture. As a cultural historian and a classicist, I naturally want to ground my thoughts historically, and I propose to do so by means of contrapuntal sketches from the reading culture of classical antiquity. Indeed the reader will have to grant me some indulgence in rooting this set of reflections so particularly in my own deepest scholarly interest, which is the reading culture of the ancient Greeks. But I hope to convince you, first, that consideration of the "otherness" of an ancient reading culture can help to sharpen considerably our perspective on reading cultures generally-including our contemporary technologically driven one. Second, although most will readily grant a broad relation between reading and education, I hope also to convince you that the understanding of reading culture is central to perceiving in its particulars not only how technological change may affect education but also how educators, and in particular instructors in the humanities, may be able to derive clear advantage from technological change.
But what do I intend by speaking of reading as "reading culture"? Reading, I will insist, is a social rather than an individual phenomenon, one that develops over time, with deep roots in the traditions of a given society. Reading is not, in my view, an act, or even a process, but a system, a highly complex cultural system that involves a great many considerations beyond the decoding by the reader of the words of the (author's) text. I therefore speak deliberately of "reading culture" rather than of "literacy" or of "writing technologies," both because that is my preferred focus and because I think mistaken the sort of analysis that starts from the viewpoint either that writing is a watershed phenomenon, and thus the world divides into literate and nonliterate, or that writing is a "technology" that can be studied in isolation, as though the whole of reading were the interaction between the technology and the user of that technology. That reading involves many variables, that there are in fact many types of reading, that reading is a complex cultural system, may seem very obvious propositions. But these points have been so willfully neglected by such a long and distinguished line of researchers that I do not think they can be overemphasized here at the start of these reflections.
Indeed, what prompts me to this more general and theoretical consideration of reading culture is my deep dissatisfaction with the terms in which researchers have typically sought to describe both ancient and contemporary reading cultures. As I ponder these matters, I come increasingly to believe that the very missteps made in analysis of the ancient world, some of which are generally recognized as missteps today, are being repeated, mutatis mutandis, in contemporary commentary on the great paradigm shift going on about us, often called the "electronic revolution"-a central aspect of which is, in my view, a shift in the paradigm of the contemporary reading culture. As a cultural historian, I have come to hope, then, that a better understanding of how best to describe ancient reading culture may help as we seek to understand the changes in our own. But more detail on that after I have done a bit of historical mortar as background for this inquiry.
Some Typical Fallacies in the Analysis of Reading Culture
A prominent strategy in the analysis of reading culture has for a long while been a focus on literacy, usually opposed to the oral culture, or "orality," that literacy is said to replace. Much of the early debate on this subject concentrated, remarkably, on classical Athens, and one thinks in particular of that annus mirabilis, 1963, which saw seminal publications by the anthropologist Jack Goody ("The consequences of literacy," written with Ian Watt, a professor of English literature) and the classicist Eric Havelock (Preface to Plato). These scholars and their followers have presented a variety of formulations over the years, but in essence their mode of analysis seeks to establish a consequential relation between, on one hand, the so-called rise of rationalism in classical Athens and, on the other, the introduction of the alphabet and of literate modes of thought into the previously oral society. Because the use of writing leads to a self-consciousness about elements of the spoken language (Havelock 1963; compare Olson 1994), or because writing sets statements in a form in which the texts can be compared (Goody and Watt 1963, pp. 304-45), or because writing lends itself to different habits in the accumulation of information, such as the creation of lists (Goody 1977), writing is taken to be directly causative in the genesis of an analytic, critical frame of mind and thus causative of things like logical analysis and detailed proof. It is, then, this self-conscious mode of analysis that leads to the cataclysmic moment when (we are told) myth is replaced by history, rhetoric by logic and philosophy, magic by science-when by virtue of the "rise of rationalism" the traditional mythological way of looking at things is cast off in favor of the modern conception of the world. At the most speculative reach of this set of theories, the liberalizing effects of the new rationalist intellectualism are taken so far as to account for the rise of democracy.
The specific problems with these theories scarcely need rehearsing (see Thomas 1992, pp. 15-28). For one thing, it seems fairly obvious that, if literacy is in itself such a powerful agent, we might expect the effects in ancient Greece to show up outside of Athens and Ionia. In any case, detailed research into oral cultures has not been able to affirm the sort of clear-cut, essential differences posited between literate and oral societies (for example, Finnegan 1988). Likewise, cognitive psychologists (I think in particular of the classic 1981 study by Scribner and Coles, The Psychology of Literacy) have failed to find general cognitive differences in memory, classification, or logical abilities following the introduction of writing systems into an oral society.
Theories that rely on literacy as an agent of change are therefore not in good repute these days-but they continue to be enormously influential. Perhaps, then, it is worth a brief look at what is wrong, in methodological terms, about this sort of analysis. First is the easy misstep into technological determinism. Whether the focus has been on the alphabet, on literacy generally, or, as more recent and nuanced studies have done (see especially Olson 1994) on the technology of writing itself, there is a tendency to see cultural change as the immediate and indeed necessary result of the introduction of a technology. This reductionist tendency among researchers is hardly restricted to studies of ancient Greece. Amusingly similar conclusions about what "causes" the development of the modern conception of the world can be found, for instance, in Eisenstein's book on the printing press (Eisenstein 1979), and, most recently, in Saenger's account of how the introduction of spaces between words in medieval manuscripts led directly to the rise of complex, abstract thinking-this time in the twelfth century (Saenger 1997) In commentary on our era, a similar tendency presents itself. The computer is made the "cause" of a great many developments: loss of memory, loss of the ability to attend oral discourse, loss of expertise in reading. But, we ought to ask, in what sense is the introduction of technology directly causative?
The second methodological fallacy I would like to highlight is that of the replacement technology. In the orality-and-literacy debates I have just reviewed, a major problem has to do with the terms of the analysis. What is oral is seen as opposite to what is written. Thus oral society is taken to be opposite to literate society, and we coin a term, "orality," to oppose to "literacy." We can now say, although the meaning is not very clear, that literacy opposes orality and that as literacy rises, orality falls, that is, that literacy replaces orality. This may sound reasonable enough, in its vague way. But culture is not a zero-sum game. Scholars have spent a great deal of effort establishing exactly that: oral culture changes as literate culture is established and changes, but oral culture hardly goes away or even diminishes. Literacy and orality are simply not contrastive terms in any strict sense. (For striking medieval examples, see Carruthers 199o, and, more generally, Thomas 1992 and Finnegan 1988.)
Once again this sort of misstep is replaying itself in the contemporary debate. From Marshall McLuhan onwards, we encounter repeated suggestions that we are moving away from a fully literate era back to a "more oral" (or sometimes "more visual") society (McCluhan 1962). This sort of observation, which we now see to be problematic in itself, is often linked to predictions or anxieties about the demise of the printed book. In 1981, for example, I sat in a conference at UCLA in which the chair of the Classics Department confidently declared that the printed scholarly book would be unknown by the end of the decade and that new printed books of any type would soon be rare; more recently, in the Times Literary Supplement I read of the anxieties about what will happen as CD-ROMs (inevitably, it seems) replace printed books (Miller 1998, p. 7; compare Bolter 1991, pp. 1-3). But in contrast to the hype of the "paperless office" is the reality of offices awash in paper; in contrast to our anxieties about the demise of the book is the fact that more books are published and sold today than ever before. This is the replacement technology fallacy. The paradigm shift of the electronic revolution is often compared to sweeping changes brought on by the printing press and the automobile. We must be careful, however, about the terms of the analogy. The horseless carriage did replace the carriage with horse, and the printing press did replace the handwritten book. But electronic technology is not a replacement technology for printed materials in the same way. The automobile, after all, did not usher in a new age of proliferation of countless horses; nor did the printing press engender the production of numberless handwritten manuscripts. But the computer has accompanied an explosion in printed texts-alongside an explosion in digital texts. Likewise, in ancient Greece the use of writing and written records over time surely interacted with and helped change the use of oral discourse, but it did not obliterate it by any means and arguably did not diminish it. Written discourse is no more, for most purposes, a replacement technology for oral discourse than, for most purposes, CD-ROMs are a replacement technology for books.
The Sociocultural Construction of Reading
If we reject the sort of sweeping cultural analysis that charts movements from oral to literate and back to oral or onward to visual, or that focuses reductively on one part of the reading system, how then do we go about our analysis, and how does that analysis intersect with the topic announced in the title, namely, education? In analyzing the reading culture of the ancient Greeks, I seek to move from the known to the unknown, to see what differentiates reading in antiquity from the reading-from-a-printed-book model so familiar to us. As my work in this area has continued, I have found that the basis of analysis grows ever wider, for I must look not simply into cognitive models of how the reader interacts with the physical text but also at the physical setting of reading, the aesthetics of reading production and apprehension, the sociology of the groups participating in the reading-in broad terms, the negotiated, sociocultural construction of reading. In trying to understand what may be different about contemporary reading experiences in the new techno-culture, a similarly broad-based analysis seems to me essential. And-what makes the analysis important for the topic before us-as an educator, I am increasingly struck by how this broad-based analysis intersects materially both with problems in learning and with the sort of sociocultural dynamics that are central to the educational enterprise. Again, I take as my starting point an example from ancient Greece.
To begin, let us focus on how the physical tool, in ancient terms the book roll, interacts with our understanding of the system of reading. It will help simplify matters if we focus on a subset of ancient reading culture, so I will restrict my remarks to literary prose texts. Now, the ancient literary book is striking in several respects. (For full details on the ancient book, see Turner 1987; Johnson 2003.) The sort of book I have in mind is, of course, not a bound, printed volume but a handwritten roll, held horizontally, written in columns that were regular, left- and right-justified, and very narrow (about fifteen to twenty-five letters, that is, two to three inches, in width, and six to ten inches in height). The letters of the text were clearly, often calligraphically, written, but otherwise undifferentiated: that is, there were no spaces between words. The main sentence breaks were marked by a horizontal stroke at the left edge of the column, but there was otherwise little or no punctuation. And nothing to mark larger structures: no paragraph breaks, no running heads, no page or column numbers. The lines were divided rationally, at the end of a word or syllable, but otherwise the column was organized as a tight phalanx of clear, distinct letters, each marching one after the other to form an impression of continuous flow, the letters forming a solid rectangle of written text alternating with narrower bands of white space. The visual effect was, then, not unlike a strip of 35 mm film. The product seems, to the modern eye, something almost more akin to an art object than a book; and, with its lack of word spaces and punctuation, the ancient book roll seems spectacularly, even bewilderingly, impractical and inefficient as a reading tool.
This may seem an exceedingly strange way of putting together a book. But it was no flash in the pan. This idea of the literary book prevailed for almost one thousand years in the Greek tradition and was eventually adopted by the Romans in the early empire.
Continues...
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