Creating a Literate Environment in Freshman English: Why and How

Author(s): Patrick Hartwell

Source: Rhetoric Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 4-20
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PATRICK HARTWELL
Indiana
University
of
Pennsylvania
Creating
a Literate Environment in Freshman
English: Why
and How
I want to start with three
stories,
to
give
me a frame of reference for
rejecting
one common view of
literacy
in our
profession
and
substituting
a better
one, and then to serve as a basis for some
speculations
on how this
emergent
perspective might
affect us as teachers of
composition.
The first
story is,
as I
recall, from Michael Cole and
Sylvia
Scribner's 1974
study,
Culture and
Thought.
An
anthropologist, among
the
Kpelle
in
Liberia, presents
an illiterate
farmer with
twenty
items
spread
out on a
table,
the
items,
in the
anthropolo-
gist's mind, neatly grouped
into four
groups
of five each
-
fruits and
vegetables,
let's
say,
and kitchen
implements
and farm
implements.
The
anthropologist
asks the farmer to
group
the
objects,
and the farmer
produces
ten sets of two
each, using
what
Piaget
would call
"operational thought"
-
the knife
goes
with
the
orange
because the knife cuts the
orange.
The
anthropologist questions
the
farmer about the
logic
of this
arrangement,
until the
farmer,
now somewhat
defensive, says adamantly,
"This is how a smart
person
would do it." "How
would a dumb
person
do it?" the
anthropologist
asks. The farmer
immediately
rearranges
the
objects
into four
groups
of five each
-
fruits and
vegetables,
and
kitchen
implements
and farm
implements.
So there are smart
ways
of
doing
things
and dumb
ways
of
doing things
-
even illiterate
people
know that.
The second
story
is about
my daughter Beth,
back when she was six
years
old and we moved from Los
Angeles,
where she
grew up,
to
Michigan,
so I could
begin my
first
teaching job.
In
California, we'd driven
up
to the mountains
several times to see the
snow, but, as it
happened,
we'd never seen the snow
falling.
And in
Michigan,
the first
couple
of times it
snowed,
it snowed
during
the
night,
so that we woke
up
to find snow on the
ground. Then one afternoon the
snow started to
fall, and
Beth,
her
eyes suddenly
wide with
wonder, went to the
window.
"Oh," she said, "so that's the
way
it is."
(It kind of
spoils
a
story
when
you
have to
explain it, but
you see, Beth, like
any
active
learner,
was
making hypotheses
about the world around
her, and the
best
hypothesis available to
her, before she saw the snow
fall, was that it
grew
up
out of the
ground,
like most
everything
else around her.) At
any rate, I
hope
to
get pretty
much the same
response
from
you
as reader
-
"Oh,
so that's the
way
it
is: It doesn't
grow up
out of the
ground,
it falls from the
sky."
The third
story
is about
my wife, Chip, who's
begun to
study Chinese and
who
hopes
to visit China this summer.
Chip
was
learning
her
vocabulary using
both the Chinese characters and the romanized version of
Chinese,
called
Rhetoric
Review,
Vol.
6,
No.
1,
Fall 1987
4
Creating
a Literate Environment in Freshman English:
Why
and How
pinyin. Naturally enough, Chip
was more comfortable with
pinyin
than with
characters. But her friend
Lucy,
who
speaks
Chinese and who's been to
China,
warned her about this
misperception: "Oh, Chip,"
she said, "you
don't
speak
Chinese in
pinyin, you speak
it in characters." One of
my arguments
here is that
that's true of all of us literate adults: We don't
speak
in
pinyin,
we
speak
in
characters. Thus,
I'll
argue
that we
are,
as a
profession,
rather dumb, like Cole
and Scribner's
anthropologist.
And like
my daughter Beth,
we
may
have it
just
backwards. We
speak
in
characters, and
yet
we concentrate on
pinyin.
We are
deeply implicated
with
-
even,
in some small
way,
constitutive of
-
human
literacy, yet
most of us
spend
most of our
professional
lives
chipping away
at the
veneer of
language,
while
literacy
-
Josephine
Miles ("What We
Compose")
is
incisive about the relevance of this
metaphor
-
literacy goes deep
into the
grain
of the wood. Let me
give
three
examples
of how dumb we are: the 1982
anthology
on
literacy
edited
by
James C.
Raymond, Literacy
as a Human
Problem; what
I've elsewhere called "the
Ong-Farrell party
line"
("Response
to Thomas J.
Farrell" 461);
and the research of E. D.
Hirsch, Jr.
Three "Dumb" Views of
Literacy
I think it's fair to
pick
on
Raymond's anthology
because it comes with a
certain
authority
-
published by
the
University
of Alabama
press,
edited
by
the
new editor of
College English, featuring
most of the
big guns
in our
profession
-
Frank
D'Angelo,
Edward P. J. Corbett, Richard
Lloyd-Jones,
and so on
-
and
distributed
by
the NCTE. What do we note about the book? First
off,
we've
knuckled under to the
usage mongers,
for there's Thomas H. Middleton
whining
about
grammar
and John Simon
moaning
about
usage, right
in the first section.
Only
one of the
authors,
Frank
D'Angelo,
shows
any
awareness of the broad
range
of cross-cultural research
by
social scientists into the nature of
literacy,
but he cites that research
only
as it
supports Ong's position.
The authors
Richard
Lloyd-Jones
is a
healthy exception
-
tend to treat
literacy
as a
"single
thing."
And sure
enough,
the final word is
given
to our
departmental authority
on
literacy,
Walter J.
Ong,
S.J.
Thus I think it's fair
-
even essential
-
to
pick
on the
Ong-Farrell party
line (for Ong's work, see his The Presence
of
the Word and his contribution to the
Raymond anthology;
for Farrell's work, see his
"IQ
and Standard
English"
and
"Reply by
Thomas J. Farrell").
The
party
line treats
alphabetic literacy
as a
special form, it focuses on the surface features of
literacy,
the "standard forms of
the verb 'to be'" in Farrell's version
("IQ
and Standard
English" 481),
it makes
an absolute
-
and unwarranted
-
distinction between "oral" and "literate"
culture, and, most
insidiously,
it asks us to see our inner
city
students as
specially deprived, trapped
in a "residual oral
culture";
the
problem
is "in
them."
Sylvia
Scribner and Michael Cole's cross-cultural
perspective questions
such deficit models
nicely:
5
Rhetoric Review
The school's
knowledge base,
value
system,
and dominant
learning
situations, and the functional
learning systems
to which
they give
rise are all in conflict with those of the students' traditional culture.
... The
problem
does not lie "in them." Searches for
specific
"inca-
pacities"
and "deficiencies" are
socially
mischievous detours.
("Cognitive Consequences" 558)
Ethnographic
studies of
elementary literacy
have
sharpened
our sense of these
conflicts,
both as
they operate
as
gaps
between school
knowledge
and commu-
nity knowledge (Gilmore and
Glatthorn; Heath, Ways
with
Words) and as
"hidden curricula" in schools
(Anyon; Gilmore; Mosenthal;
Simon and Wil-
linsky).
And I think it's also fair to
pick
on E. D.
Hirsch, Jr., partly
because of the
arrogance
of the title of his 1977
book, Philosophy of Composition,
and
partly
because,
now that he's had to
give up
on the central
assumption
of the 1977 book
-
that
"readability"
is somehow "in" the text
-
he's turned to
writing
about
"cultural
literacy" ("Cultural Literacy";
"Culture and
Literacy"; "Reading,
Writing,
and Cultural
Literacy"). Literacy,
in this
view,
is
privileged
knowl-
edge,
and it's transmitted
by
the teacher at the center of the
learning process.
(More general
criticisms of Hirsch's
position
are offered
by
Bizzell and
Herzberg
and
by Douglas.)
(Of course,
I want to
hedge
in these criticisms. I think Farrell does us a favor
by bringing
out into the
open
attitudes that are
only implicit
in
Ong's work,
and
I think the
recognition,
in the works of both Hirsch and
Raymond,
that we
are,
as
English teachers, deeply
involved in the transmission of
literacy,
is a salu-
tary one.)
Nevertheless, each of these views of
literacy
remains a "dumb" view.
Patricia Bizzell
("Literacy
in Culture and
Cognition") identifies, as do
others,
"the
great cognitive
divide" between those
who, like
Farrell, Hirsch, Ong,
and
most of the contributors to the
Raymond anthology,
see
literacy
as
conveying
some
special cognitive
values
-
what Beth Daniels calls "the
great leap
for-
ward"
theory
of
literacy
-
and those of us who see
literacy
as instead embedded
in social
relationships,
a matter of
metacognition, metalinguistic awareness,
and
deep experiential learning,
as
opposed
to the direct instruction of isolable
skills.
Roger Shuy captures
this
perspective
on
language learning
with an
"iceberg" metaphor:
what we can be
consciously
aware of as teachers is the
top
of
the
iceberg;
what is seminal in the transmission of
literacy
is below the
surface,
under the water.
"Something
is
happening," anthropologist Clifford Geertz
observes,
"to the
way
we think about the
way
we think"
(166). Oh, so that's the
way
it is.
There are lots of
good
overviews of this
emergent perspective
on
literacy
(there are review articles
by
Bizzell
["Literacy
in Culture and
Cognition"],
by
Brandt, by Chall,
and
by Scribner; books
by
Daniels and
by Pattison, and a
6
Creating
a Literate Environment in Freshman
English: Why
and How
stunning
series of
anthologies
on
elementary literacy
-
those edited
by
Gilmore
and
Glatthorn; by Goelman, Hillel,
and
Smith; by Goodman, Haussler,
and
Strickland, by Jagger
and
Smith-Burke, by Langer
and
Smith-Burke,
and
by
Olson, Torrance, and
Hildyard), so, rather than to
develop
this view fully, I'll
simply pause
to
clarify
two of the
key
terms above
-
"metacognition"
and
"metalinguistic
awareness."
Metacognition
is the
ability
to monitor one's
learning.
I asked students in
my graduate
seminar in
reading theory,
"When
you're reading
and
you
don't
understand,
what's the first
thing you
have to do?" The next
class,
students
offered dozens of what I think of as
"repair procedures": keep reading,
it
might
get clearer;
if there's a word
you
don't
understand,
look it
up;
ask someone for
help;
find an easier book on the same
topic;
reread what
you
didn't
understand;
and so on. All are
legitimate repair procedures,
but each
is,
if
you
think about it,
the second
thing you might
do. The first
thing you
have to do is
metacognitive:
you
have to understand that
you
don't understand. And that's of course what
poor
readers can't do (see the reviews
by
Baker and Brown and
by
Forrest-
Pressley
and Waller), just
as
poor writers,
as Robert Bracewell has
noted, face
problems
that need to be defined as
metacognitive
rather than
cognitive.
Metalinguistic
awareness is the awareness of
language
as
language.
Psychologists
test this at the
elementary
level
by asking
about
concepts
of word
or
by asking,
"Can a stone learn to talk?" Scribner and Cole
(Psychology of
Literacy)
tested
metalinguistic
awareness
among
the tri-literate Vai of
Liberia,
variously
literate in
English, through schooling,
in
Arabic,
for
religious pur-
poses,
and in an
indigenous
Vai
script,
for
personal uses, by asking,
"Can
you
call the moon the sun and the sun the moon?" Literate
Vai, regardless
of the
orthographies they
were literate
in,
tended to
say "sure"; illiterate Vai tended to
have
grave
doubts about such
metalinguistic play.
And I've found that
"concept
of word" is not stable even at the
college
level
-
I've walked into various classes
and
said,
"How
many
words in the
sentence,
'I've
got
a lot of work to do'?"
repeating
it
orally
until students wrote a number. Basic
writing
students tended
to
say
there were five words in the
sentence; regular
freshmen found
seven;
and
graduate students, hyperliterate
as
ever, found nine. (For review articles on
metalinguistic awareness,
see Hakes and Pratt and Grieve.)
What's "Dumb" about
Being
"Dumb"?
Let me note four false
assumptions
of the
guys
on the other side of the
great
cognitive
divide
-
the dumb
guys. First, they reify alphabetic literacy, giving
it
a
privileged place among orthographies;
in other
words, they
think we talk in
pinyin.
The truth is rather that
alphabetic literacy
is
highly
abstract
-
we talk
in
characters, you'll
remember
-
and surface features of the
code,
like "full
realization of the standard forms of the verb 'to be'"
(Farrell, "IQ
and Standard
English" 481),
seem much less
important
than these abstract concomitants.
7
8 Rhetoric Review
Ultimately, then, orthographies
are much less
important
than the social and
cultural uses to which those
systems
are
put. Thus,
a
good general
rule is that
cultures
cling stubbornly
to their
orthographies
-
and
they
are
right
to do so:
the Ulithians in Micronesia
today
are
right
to
reject
missionaries'
attempts
to
regularize
their
orthography (Walsh);
the
Japanese
were
right
to
reject
McAr-
thur's
attempt,
after World War II- and the
Chinese, more
recently,
to
reject
Mao's
attempt (Bonavia; Sheridan)
-
to make their cultures write in
pinyin.
After all,
we have
enough examples
of what
happens
when
orthographies
are
imposed
from without
-
the
Cherokee, ninety percent
literate in 1890 and
thirty percent
literate in
1930,
after
they
were forced to
give up
the
syllabary
devised
by
Silas John
(Halle);
the Old
English, trapped
in the
marginal literacy
of an
orthography imposed
on them
by
Irish
priests (O'Neil, "English
Orthography").
Second,
these
guys
assume there's a stable world "out
there,"
as it were:
readability
is in the text, literacy
is measured
by literacy tests, writing
is
measured
by
"full standard
deployment
of the verb 'to be."' But our
theory
of
language
tells us to look at
reality
as internal rather than
external, as con-
structed rather than "out there" (for a rhetorical
perspective,
see
Gibson;
for a
social science
perspective,
see
Harad;
for a
philosophical perspective,
see
Rorty),
and historical studies tell us that
literacy
is embedded in tacit traditions of texts
that
develop dynamically through
time
(see,
for
example,
the studies of
literacy
in western
Europe by Eisenstein; Kaestle's review of texts and readers; Resnick
and Resnick's historical
perspectives
on the
meaning
of
literacy;
and the various
perspectives
in the
anthology
edited
by
Daniel P.
Resnick). Studies of education
remind us that educational
goals
are
intimately
entwined with cultural
pro-
cesses and
assumptions.
Daniel
Calhoun,
for
example,
finds
quite
different
concepts
of "educated
person" implicit
at different
points
in American educa-
tion, and James Donald reminds us that
"illiteracy"
is a
nineteenth-century
invention
(coterminous,
as we
might suspect,
with the
discovery
that the
prob-
lem is "in
them").
Studies of the
professions
-
Richard Ohmann's
study
of
college English,
Frances
Fitzgerald's study
of
changing
values in American
history texts,
Jean
Anyon's
examination of
concept
of "work" in
high
school
social science classes
-
remind us that
things
are not what
they seem, that
there are "hidden curricula" in the
way
we do our businesses.
Consider, most
obviously,
Michel Foucault's
insight
that three cultural institutions that de-
veloped
in the
eighteenth century
-
prisons,
insane
asylums,
and schools
-
share common
underlying purposes:
to observe, discipline,
and
punish. Oh, so
that's the
way
it is.
Third,
these
guys
assume that
literacy
is a
"single thing," again,
"out there"
as it were. Thus,
we can talk about "a
literacy
crisis" (rather than, perhaps,
multiple literacy crises?) and of
"writing development"
and of
"reading prob-
lems" and so on, each to be mended or remediated
by
-
you guessed
it
-
skills
Creating
a Literate Environment in Freshman
English: Why
and How
instruction. But
ethnographic
studies
suggest
that
literacy development
is
highly irregular (Graves), renegotiated,
in James L. Collins'
happy phrase,
"each time written
language
is used." Thus, these
guys
-
Farrell and
Ong
in
particular
-
make a
simplistic
distinction between "the oral" and "the literate."
There's not one
orality
and one
literacy,
each fixed and stable, but a universe of
oralities and literacies, interacting
in much more
complex ways
than an either-
or divide would
suggest (on this issue, see Heath, "Oral and Literate Traditions"
and "Protean
Shapes"
and Tannen). In this
view, the smart view, surface
features of
literacy
are less
important
than their
metalinguistic
and
metacogni-
tive
concomitants,
and those concomitants are
deeply
embedded in a social
world.
Finally,
these
guys
share a view of the teacher as the center of
authority-
this shows
up again
and
again: literacy
skills are transmitted or
imparted,
reading problems
are remediated, writing
is
taught
rather than
learned,
and so
on.
Again,
it's as if we talked in
pinyin,
when
you'll
remember what
Lucy
told
Chip
-
we talk in characters.
A "Smart"
Approach
to
Literacy
Now let's sort this
literacy
business out another
way,
a smart
way
-
"oh,
so
that's the
way
it is." And then let's ask how this smart view
might
affect us as
college composition
teachers.
First off, literacy
itself is no
big thing.
We have
example
after
example
of
cultures where
people
master
literacy systems
outside of
schooling, usually
in
late adolescence,
in a matter of a few weeks
(Conklin's study
of
literacy
in the
Philippines;
Scribner and Cole's
study
of the Vai in
Liberia, Psychology of
Literacy;
Walsh's remarks on
literacy among
the Ulithians in
Micronesia).
And
we
recognize,
in the
history
of our own
culture,
that disenfranchised
peoples
women, working-class
males
-
have,
at least in small
numbers,
been able to
acquire literacy
outside of
schooling. Autobiographical
accounts of
working-
class
literacy
differ in the
importance they
allot to formal
schooling (for exam-
ple,
it seems central to the education of Richard
Rodriguez,
but
peripheral
to the
educations of
Jagdish
Gundara or of Charlene Thomas
[Heath
and
Thomas]).
So
the whole
emphasis
on "skills" instruction is
just wrong-headed,
and
my guess
is
at this
point
that the more we
try
to transmit isolate
skills,
the more we block
students from
mastering
them
-
and from
mastering
the
deeper knowledges
that are much more
important (Shuy;
Frank
Smith,
"The Choice Between
People
and
Programs"
and "A Revised
Approach
to
Language Learning").
Second,
the
alphabetic system
of
writing English
does not reflect sound in
very many significant ways;
it reflects
meaning.
The
early
Greek
writing
system may
have been
phonetic (Havelock),
I'm
willing
to
grant that,
but our
orthography
is
something
far more
abstract,
as Noam
Chomsky
and Morris
Halle
point
out
by citing
word
patterns
like
sign::signal, serene::serenity,
and
9
Rhetoric Review
even
telegraph::telegrapher::telegraphy,
where the
system preserves meaning
rather than sound
(see
also Carol
Chomsky).
John Hurt Fisher
concluded,
from
his historical
investigations,
that standard written
English developed
in
Eng-
land of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a shared court
system,
Chan-
cery English,
unrelated to
any
dialect of
English. Thus,
to cite a
single example,
Middle
English
eren becomes Modern
English
errand
through
a series of
changes
that have little to do with
pronunciation,
but a
great
deal to do with the
internal
consistency
of the abstract written
system.
That
consistency
creates a
meaning relationship
between "wander"
(errand, knight-errant)
and "make a
mistake"
(error, errata) that has no
etymological
basis. So our culture also
clings
stubbornly
to its
orthography,
in the face of
spelling
reformers
seeking
a more
"logical" (i.e., phonetic) spelling system.
And it is
right
to do so.
Now,
of
course,
we literate adults think our
orthography
reflects sound
-
that's
just part
of
being
a literate adult, and
Wayne
O'Neil
rightly dismisses
these
misperceptions
as "our collective
phonological
illusions." I once heard a
colleague
advise a student who was
trying
to
spell basically, "oh, just
sound it
out," and a recent
study by Jakimik, Cole,
and
Rudnicky
found that
college
students "hear" the sound /b/ in words like
combing
and at the end of bomb.
But we can dismiss all this as the unfortunate
baggage
we adults literate in an
alphabetic system
have to
carry
around with
us,
as literate
pinyin
when
pinyin
doesn't count.
Indeed, such
baggage aside,
a
strong argument
would be
that,
when we turn
our attention to skilled adult
reading
and
writing,
as
opposed
to
learning
to read
and write, orthographies
aren't
nearly
as
important
as Farrell and Havelock
and
Ong
would claim. Joshua
Fishman, studying
five
minority language
schools
in New York
City,
the
languages ranging
from Chinese to Greek to
Hebrew,
found the
orthography question simply unimportant,
and Scribner and Cole
(Psychology of Literacy)
found few
script-specific
effects
among
the triliterate
Vai in
Liberia,
and those effects were much less
important
than other variables
-
urban Vai as
opposed
to
rural,
for
example,
or schooled Vai as
opposed
to
unschooled. (The experimental
evidence
-
as
opposed
to
ethnographic evidence
-
about the role of
orthography
in
reading
is
admittedly more
tangled;
see the
discussion in
Taylor
and Taylor and the various
positions
in the
anthologies
edited
by
Henderson and
by Hudelson.)
Thus, third, print literacy
is best
seen, not as a
code,
but as traditions of
text,
ways
of
behaving
with
language.
I read with
expectations
about what a
given
document
might
be allowed to
do,
and I locate
myself
as writer within
given
traditions that
are, ultimately, ways
of be
having
-
or not
behaving,
as the case
may
be. That
is,
I write in
characters,
not in
pinyin. David R. Olson
points
out
the historical
origins,
in the
eighteenth century,
of what he calls
"English
essayist literacy,"
and Ron and Suzanne B. K. Scollon stress the distance
between
"English essayist literacy"
and other
ways
of
behaving with
language,
10
Creating
a Literate Environment in Freshman
English: Why
and How
such as those of the Athabascans of central Alaska.
Josephine
Miles ("What We
Already
Know about
Composition")
and Patricia Bizzell ("William Perry
and
Liberal Education") have
speculated
in
interesting ways
on this
"weight
of
texts" as it bears on the
teaching
of
writing,
and structuralist scholars in
Europe
have focused on how this tradition of texts
impinges
on the writer (see Barthes;
Derrida, Writing
and
Difference
and
Of Grammatology;
W. Ross Winterowd has
been the soundest
interpreter
of the
implications
of this tradition for rhetorical
theory ["Black Holes"; "The Politics of
Meaning" ]).
Fourth, we need to realize that we
English
teachers are lames, profoundly
removed from the active life of
language
in the communities we live in. The term
lame is used in the black
community
to refer to adolescents who are unable to
participate
in the
language
activities of their
community,
and William
Labov,
in a seminal
essay,
"The
Linguistic Consequences
of
Being
a Lame," notes that
it's the lames who do well in
school, get educated, become teachers, and, in his
view, become
sociolinguists, trying
to observe the active life of
language
around
them. Well,
we
English
teachers are
lames, too,
and in
many ways,
we're less
adept
at
language
than our students are. The teacher I mentioned
above,
advising
the student to "sound it out" to
spell basically,
is a
lame, and I've
elsewhere noted the
paradoxes
that it's
only
our weaker students who learn
what we tell them and that what
they
learn
helps
them behave in
ways
counter-
productive
to the
acquisition
of
literacy ("Writers as Readers"). (Some working-
class cultures
recognize
these
paradoxes
in their
profound
distrust of "book
learning.")
Thus, quite often,
we
English
teachers are
likely
to do less well at some
language
tasks than our students are. I have
replicated
Arthur Reber's classic
study
of the tacit
learning
of the
grammar
of an artificial
language again
and
again;
the
only
times I've failed to do so were in
graduate
seminars with
English
teachers. Or consider a
group
of
elementary teachers,
asked to isolate the four
sounds of the abstract
past
tense
-ed,
and
given
the
following specimen
sen-
tences:
-
He rounded third base.
-
She walked on the sidewalk.
-
I walked to the store.
-
You monitored the class.
After fifteen minutes of
trying, they reported failure; they
could
only
find three
sound
equivalents.
Sure
enough, they
were
sitting
around
saying
to each
other,
"I walked to the store" [wakt tu]
rather than "I walked to the store"
[wak
tu].
Now in real
language,
"I
[wakt tu]
the
store,"
means "I am
very angry";
"You
took the
car,
so I walked to the store." And I'm sure that's true of those teachers,
too,
outside of their classrooms. But in this
context,
as
"English
teachers at
school," they
were
simply
aberrant
language users,
lames.
11
12 Rhetoric Review
So,
all the
way through,
it's the other
way
around. The
problem
is not "in
them," as
Ong
and Farrell would tell us. The
problem
is not in
defining
and
measuring
and
teaching literacy,
as most of the contributors to the
Raymond
volume would have it. The
problem
is not in "cultural
literacy"
in the form that
Hirsch offers us. The
problem
is in the
complex four-pronged relationship
among
our students and ourselves
-
and we're
lames, you'll
remember
-
and a
tradition of texts and a
provisional, developing literacy.
The snow doesn't
grow
up
from the
ground,
it falls from the
sky,
and we don't talk in
pinyin,
we talk in
characters. Deborah Brandt,
in a recent review of this
emergent perspective
on
literacy, captures
these
insights
in a brilliant
phrase: "literacy
has less to do
with overt acts of
reading
and
writing
than it does with
underlying postures
toward
language" (128-29).
Oh,
So That's the
Way
It Is
How then do we as teachers of
composition get
at
"underlying postures
toward
language"?
I don't have solid answers to that
question,
but I will
point
to
some
ways
I'm
trying
to
get
at those
postures
in
my
own
teaching.
First
off, most
of
my
comments about
literacy
center around the social use of
language,
and I
think it's essential to establish a new
language
base in the classroom. I
try
to
banish teacher talk,
since I have
every
reason to believe that
nothing impedes
learning
more ("The Writing
Center and the Paradoxes of Written-Down
Speech"). ("Teacher talk" is
simply
"the
language
of the
classroom"; Heath's
Teacher Talk offers
typical samples
-
"I know two
girls
who are
going
to be in a
lot of
trouble,
don't I?" and
"Now, let's
put
the chairs in a
circle, shall we?") Rita
S. Brause and John S.
Mayher
sketch what this new
language
base means for
classroom discourse, adapted
here as Table
1; you'll
note that this
language
base
establishes new modes of
learning
and new roles for both learners and teachers.
Table 1
DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF LANGUAGE SETTINGS
Types
of Interactions
Empowering Controlling
-
collaborative
-
authoritarian
-
personal
-
impersonal
-
cooperative
-
evaluative
-
comfortably paced
-
time-pressured
-
negotiated
focus and methods
-
imposed
focus and form
-
responsive
to individuals
-
predetermined expectations
Creating
a Literate Environment in Freshman
English: Why
and How
Language
"Can we
go ...;" "Do
you
mean ...?" "I want
you
to ..."
"Why
.. .?" "How would
you
like...?" 'Tell me ..."
-
equality
in
quantity
- different
quantity
Effects of These Differences
-
Growth
through experimentation
-
intimidation
-
assurance/independence
-
insecurity/dependency
Authority
-
earned -
imposed
Implicit Philosophy
of
Language Development
-
Language develops
as a
product
of
-
Language develops through
participating
in activities
explicit teaching
Source: Brause and
Mayher. Copyright
? 1985 The National Council of
Teachers of
English. Reprinted by permission.
Secondly,
I'm now
following up
on some work
by
Jana
Statton, Roger Shuy,
and
Joy
Kreeft at the sixth
grade
level
by asking my
students to
keep dialogue
journals
with me (see
also
Gambrell; Kreeft;
and Statton). The current instruc-
tions are:
Entries in
your dialogue journal
should deal with four
things:
your
concerns about the class
-
the
readings,
the
conferences,
and
activities in
class;
your developing
views of
literacy
and the
college experience;
your "literacy autobiography"
-
whatever
you
can tell me about
past
and current
experiences
that have had an effect on
your reading
and
writing (toward the end of the
semester, you'll
be asked to
develop
this
"literacy autobiography"
as a
separate writing;
for now
you're just making observations);
and,
later in the
course, your
concern about
grade.
I
respond
to these entries, encouraging
continued
dialogue,
and I also enter in
the
dialogue journal
the comments and
suggestions
I make
during
conferences.
At the end of the
semester,
I ask students to
compile
a formal
"literacy
auto-
biography"
from these
continuing
observations.
Third,
I
try
to
actively
involve students in
language
in the real world. Here
I've benefitted from
Shirley
Brice Heath's
presentation
at the 1985
meeting
of
the Conference on
College Composition
and
Communication,
about how she's
been
working
with teachers at all
levels, asking
students to
investigate literacy
13
Rhetoric Review
events in their communities. Last
year my students,
in
teams,
looked at a
variety
of
literacy
events
-
at
student/secretary talk,
at
peer
talk
surrounding
a
writing event,
at
my writing conferences,
and at how students
successfully
or
unsuccessfully negotiated
their needs at the reference desk in the
library,
returning
to
present
their
findings
to the
people they
observed and to "skilled
observers," my graduate
students. I asked students to interview
professionals
working
in their
major
about the
reading
and
writing they
do on the
job.
Here I
also benefit from the work of
colleagues
and students who have allowed me to
observe their own
learning (Birns;
Hartwell and
LoPresti; Jacob; McAndrew;
Purvis; Ron Smith; Walsh; Williamson),
for as we
begin
to
explore
this
emergent
literacy
we
begin
to constitute ourselves as a discourse
community
of our own
-
the
guys
who insist that the snow falls down from the
sky.
Fourth,
I'm
seeing myself
in a new role
-
not as an
English teacher,
but as a
teacher/researcher,
an
ethnographer
of
literacy,
a "kid-watcher" in Yetta Good-
man's terms. This is not a traditional teacher role, and it's a hard one to
adopt
(oh,
let me tell
you),
but it sure is more fun.
Finally (and I must admit that I have to be more
speculative
about
this),
I
suspect
that we don't
organize
our literate lives around
knowledges,
or even
around
procedures
-
the stuff of the traditional classroom
-
but around
metaphors (Lakoff and
Johnson) and around narratives
(Rosen; Scholes),
around our own
developing literacy autobiographies. Courtney
Cazden and Dell
E.
Hymes speculate
on the
importance
of narratives in one's socialization into a
profession,
and
they
then
go
on to
point
out a
fundamental, and
unwritten, rule
of the traditional classroom
-
only
the teacher has narrative
rights.
I think
Cazden and
Hymes
are
right
about the classroom: We can tell
stories, but our
students can't. And I think
they're right
about the
centrality
of narrative in
constituting
literacies.
Consider,
for
example,
the role of narratives in the
faculty lounge
of an
English department
as a vehicle for
perpetuating
a whole
set of attitudes toward students and toward what the
teaching
of
writing
is.
Similarly,
I think if
you begin
to listen to what
goes
on at
professional meetings,
to talk in bars and at book exhibits and
publishers' parties, you'll recognize
how
important
narratives are in
forming
us as a
profession.
And even formal
pre-
sentations like this
one, though you may
not have realized
it, are structured
around
narratives, not
knowledges, around
metaphors,
not
procedures: I am
trying
to write in
characters, not
inpinyin.
And here I think of
Sylvia Scribner's
"Literacy
in Three
Metaphors," offering
three
ascending metaphors: literacy
as
"adaptation," literacy
as "power," and
literacy
as a "state of
grace." Oh, it comes
down from above.
(Admittedly, Scribner is
talking specifically
about cultures in which litera-
cy
has
strong religious overtones,
and the
goal
of that
literacy
often
is, as it was
in
eighteenth-century
America
[Resnick and
Resnick]
or as it is in
Qu'aranic
literacy today
[Pattison;
Scollon and
Scollon]
the
ability
to read the sacred text
14
Creating
a Literate Environment in Freshman
English: Why
and How
aloud, with or without
understanding.
But I've learned that we have to
place
a
lot of trust in
metaphors.)
To
adopt
this kind of stance,
as I've noted elsewhere
("Grammar, Gram-
mars, and the
Teaching
of Grammar")
is to
give up
a
great
deal of
power,
and it's
always
hard to
give up power.
But the result is to
empower
our students. David
R. Olson and
Nancy
Torrance look at this
power question, speculating
about
"writing
and
criticizing
texts" at the
high
school level. Our kids have trouble
being
critical readers, they note, explaining
that situation
by
the
power
that
text has in American schools
(and
also
by
the fact that texts
manage
to sound so
authoritative about
things
that
any
researcher in a
given
field knows are much
messier). Similarly, they
note that our students have trouble
improving
their
writing,
and
they explain
that
by
their
having
to write for an invariant audience
of teacher as examiner, seen as a social
superior,
and hence
involving
a defer-
ence
vocabulary
and a submissive stance that
prevent learning. They put
it this
way:
The solution to the
problem
of both readers and writers is the
recovery
of a sense of
authority,
not
necessarily
of
superiority
to an
audience,
but of an
equality
to readers who make
up
the writer's
peer group.
True discourse exists
only
between
equals.
As a
reader,
one must come to see the writer of a text as
basically equal
to
oneself,
and as a
writer,
one must come to see the
audience, including
the
teacher as
reader,
as
basically equal
to oneself.
(40)
The neat
thing
is
that,
once kids
get
this kind of
insight
-
"oh, so that's the
way
it is"
-
nobody
can ever take it
away
from
them,
convince them that the
snow
grows up
from the
ground.
Here's a kid
telling
a
story
to
Lucy
McCormick
Calkins:
Before I ever wrote a
book,
I used to think there wa s a
big machine,
and
they typed
a title and then the machine went until the book was
done.
Now I look at a book and I know a
guy
wrote it and it's been his
project
for a
long
time. After the
guy
writes
it,
he
probably
thinks of
questions people
will ask him and revises it like I
do,
and xeroxes it
to read to about six editors. And then he fixes it
up,
like how
they
say. (157)
That kid is
only
seven
years old,
and he's
got
an
insight
-
an
equality
with text
-
that no amount of skills instruction can later take
away.
Of
course,
as
Greg
Jacob
notes,
if this new
perspective
is hard for us as
teachers,
it's
equally
hard for our students: Most of them have
played
a different
game
-
the teacher controls the text
-
through
most of their
schooling,
and it's
as hard for them to assume
power
as it is for us to
give
it
up.
So
making
freshman
English
into a literate environment takes time. After
all,
we're now
learning
to
15
Rhetoric Review
deal with
"underlying postures
toward
language."
And if I've taken
years
to
learn that "this is how a smart
person
would do it" and that the snow falls down
from the
sky
and that we talk in
characters, not in
pinyin,
then I've
got
to
give
my
students a little room
-
a little narrative
space
-
for them to
gain
those
insights
for themselves.
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Patrick Hartwell is Professor of
English
at Indiana
University
of
Pennsylvania.
He is the
coauthor,
with Robert H.
Bentley,
of
Open
to
Language:
A New
College
Rhetoric (New York: Oxford UP, 1982;
2nd ed., Random House, in
press),
and he has
published articles on the
teaching
of
composition in such
journals as College Composition
and
Communication, College English, and Research in the
Teaching of
English.
CCCC COMMITTEE SEEKS INFORMATION
ABOUT SCHOOL-COLLEGE LIAISONS
AND COLLABORATIVE PROGRAMS
FOR WRITING TEACHERS
The Committee on Collaboration Between School and
College Writing
Teachers of the
Conference on
College Composition
and Communication seeks information on and
descriptions
of successful
programs
in which the
English
teachers of
secondary schools
or school districts maintain close
liaison,
information
exchange,
or collaboration with
English
teachers in
colleges
or universities. Brief notes as well as more formal
descrip-
tions are welcome. Please include names and addresses of contact
people.
Mail
by
January 1, 1988,
to
Jerry
L.
Cook, Wedgwood
Middle
School,
3909 Wilkie
Way,
Fort
Worth, TX 76133.
20