Reading and writing in English U214B Chapter 2

Introduction: Literacy Practices

• •

The concept of

literacy practices

refers to the practices which

people engage in that involve reading or writing, or ways in which people interact with texts (and with one another, through the use

of texts). The concept was proposed by the anthropologist Brian Street

to emphasize the connection between the individual’s use of written language and his or her social identity

.

For example, parents and children are involved in shared reading, but that is not universal. It is the practice in some societies only. What literacy activities have you been involved in since this morning? How did you perform them? With whom?

Some examples of literacy practices are whether one reads aloud or quietly, whether one writes in one language or produces bilingual texts, whether when writing a personal letter one includes greetings and a formal introductory part, or immediately gets into the letter with informal greetings, whether one studies alone or in a study group, at home or in the library, whether one reads in a book or on a digital device, one writes notes in the margins or simply highlights an important point? ...

• • •

Introduction: Signs…

The chapter introduces several influential approaches to the analysis of texts. People think about written language in terms of

signs :

forms (e.g. words) that are conventionally associated with particular concepts (i.e. the meanings of words) . This approach is known as

semiotics

and is founded on the work of the linguist Ferdinand Saussure. Saussure argued that signs are only

meaningful because they belong to accepted sign systems.

• [without being part of an alphabet, the letter N is not a letter but a zigzag shape](48). N is only meaningful as part of the English alphabet system, but outside that it is simply a zigzag shape no different or more significant than Z or ꡝ or any random shape. But – understanding texts requires us to consider purposes for which people use them, and this requires us to think about the

genre,

or conventional type, of any text we analyze. Moreover, just as the meaning of talk is communicated through gesture and tone of voice as well as through language, the meaning of text is usually communicated in a range of different ways. Writing is considered in

multimodal

terms, with attention to its visual as well as its linguistic aspects.

• • • • • • •

Reading Signs

Modern English depends on both texts and images. At the level of texts, the letters of the English alphabet can be understood, as per

Saussure

, as a system of signs in which letters play the role of signs. Each letter has particular visual characteristics, typically associated with particular sounds. Letters can also convey more complex meanings - (possibilities of letter combinations and, superficially similar shapes/letters but different letters by mere belonging to a different alphabet and set of letters…) One of Saussure’s key points was that

signs are only meaningful insofar as they exist

in opposition to other signs. The letter M is meaningful because it is different from W, and p is meaningful because it is not q.

Saussure also regarded the vocabulary of a language as a sign system functioning in the same basic way. Many linguists now reject this view. They look at vocabulary that has no foreseeable future, and which is part of the living language as opposed to the alphabet which is a fixed code. Living languages accept new words all the time, both in the form of

coinages newly invented words/ sometimes through derivation

) and in the form of

borrowings

(i.e. words originating in other languages).

(i.e. Semiotic theory

suggests that, in order to enter a new language, an existing word must change in some way, becoming a new sign in a new sign system – and this is what we see when we look at actual cases of borrowing (beautiful – originating from beauty borrowed from French beaut é . Thus, Saussure argued that ‘[within the same language, all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally’ (lapin in French=rabbit/ in English = fur] and if a word were lost, ‘all its content would go to its competitors ’ (Saussure 1960[1916], p.116; qtd p.49).

[think of examples of borrowings into Arabic – salon, sandwich, clinic?, disk,..]

• • •

Reading Signs - Semiotics

was not used for textual analysis, but has suggested some valuable methods for textual analysis.

If it is oppositions between signs that are truly meaningful, then it is no good trying to think about the meaning of a word in isolation – a)we have to compare that word to words with related meanings;

[rabbit/ bunny/ lapin; woman/lady/female]

b) when we analyze a text, it may be very helpful to think about how its overall meaning or effect would be changed if different words had been used. Switching ‘rabbit’ to ‘lapin’ the change would be very obvious. Switching ‘rabbit’ to ‘bunny’ would produce a subtle change since both words signify the same

concept (i.e. they are

synonyms

). The change between synonymous words is not at the level of

denotation

(the concept associated with the word) but at the level of

connotation

(what the word suggests or implies) such as the affectionate {possibly childish} connotations of the word

bunny, as opposed to rabbit, where the two words denote a

specific species of animals (p.49).

Reading Signs --

• In terms of denotation, words can be

polyvalent.

A word can signify several concepts. For example, the word ‘ladies’ in the lines of poetry by Reed: Goodnight, sweet ladies Ah ladies, goodnight denotes the same entity as ‘women’ but can connate the concept of ‘aristocracy’ or have ‘patronizing’ connotations. The key behind connotations is in previous use by people in general or in the literature, such as the phrase ‘sweet ladies’ said by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

‘The meaning of words is the history of words’: a word or sign has whatever meaning it does because of the history of the ways in which people have used it (qtd p. 50) .

Because of the references to the ‘celebrated’ poets, Reed’s line seems more ‘intellectual’ that it would have done otherwise. Bakhtin said people take on other people’s voices when they speak (1981 see chapter 1); When the voice taken on is that of a great writer, this is called literary allusion, and the effect may be to identify the speaker as a ‘cultivated’ person. Semiotic analysis has been applied, not only to texts, but also to a huge range of other cultural products, including photographs and food (Barthes, qtd p. 51). Not everyone agrees to the usefulness of extending the application of semiotic analysis to these products.

    

Reading Signs --

Some key scholars do propose that

visual

images can be parsed like sentences, for example with picture elements such as lines and colors being treated analogously to parts of speech ( Dondis & Kress Van Leeuwen qtd p.51). This has been referred to as visual grammar.

[Example, direct/indirect address through angle of the camera; color as tense; clarity & resolution as level of certainty; vectors to the eye as transitivity or lack of it]

Others deny that ‘classifying and dissecting images will uncover their meaning’ and argues that the idea of ‘visual language’ is no more than ‘a loose analogy at best’(Raney qtd p.51) Another challenge to ‘reading’ images is that images need to be understood in context of how they are used by human being and not just through those signs’ systematic relationships to other signs. Pierre Bourdieu , for example, complains that the influence of Saussure has left us ‘looking within words for the power of words’ …when the power is to be found elsewhere, in the social and institutional contexts within which language is used (51). But Saussure’ s focus on

meaningful difference

between signs is undeniably useful; for example, exchanging a word with another word, of opposite meaning, such as (day for night in the lyric by Reed). Semiotic analysis often focuses on opposites or

antonyms

as well as

synonyms

) For example, in going back to the basic elements of letters, we can understand written English letters, not only because of whether or not they are included in the English alphabet, but also because of their appearance, size of font, differences in color or style of lettering to indicate the conceptual difference between a heading, a subheading, a comment and an ordinary paragraph, at the most basic level.

• Font vs. Typeface:

Meaning and Typeface

Font

is complete set of letters, numbers and punctuation marks in a single size and a single style (e.g. bold or italic), while a

typeface

is a design for a complete set of fonts (e.g. Times New Roma or Calibri). In recent years, the two have been used interchangeably, and treated as synonyms.

One of the most important non-linguistic communicators of meaning is typography.

Just as writers make choices between words, graphic designers make choices between typefaces.

Think of some shop signs and what is the appropriate font to be used for, a Computer Store for example, as opposed to an Antique shop.

Typefaces are not signs, in the same way letters are, but they can be used to associate a text with previous uses made of the same or similar typefaces, and in advertising or politics, this is used to index particular identities.

Choice of typeface: Gotham was used by Barrack Obama’s team in the presidential publicity campaign, for example, as it has its associations in keeping with Obama’s modern stylish and intellectual image; this is because this 21 st century typeface has been designed for GQ the men’s style magazine and adopted by the educational channel Discovery. John McCain’s campaign, on the other hand, chose a different typeface – Optima, a mid twentieth century typeface to remind them of his war record during that period and attract the Vietnam veterans.

Meaning and Typeface ..

o o  Typographic choice has become a part of language use for almost everyone who uses digital technology to produce texts (53).

Some people may argue that typeface will take the focus away from the words, and people will concentrate on it much more than the conceptual structure. But the very fact that typeface is so distracting, may be an indication in itself that it is so meaningful.

Typefaces are sometimes chosen for practical reasons

literacy practices (p. 56).

, such as the use of mono-spaced typefaces by computer programmers so they can precisely line up related bits of code and easily identify individual symbols, or avoiding ‘bureaucratic’ typefaces such as New Courier (and Deja Vu Sans Mono) in longer texts such as novels because of the trouble in legibility and the lack of distinction in size/height between capital letters and commas, or lower case letters. These same two typefaces are very common for other

See more examples on choices of typeface on the online versions of literary and classical texts (56-9)

 Choice of typeface also depends on the historical period, and other factors of context.

Black letter (or gothic) now is a decorative font, while it used to be the standard, uniform font when printing was introduced by Johannes Gutenberg in Europe and used in William Caxton’s 1477 edition of the fourteenth century poem, the Canteburry Tales by Chaucer. It was font avoided in Europe until very recently because of its association with Nazis and Hitler (whether that is historically true or not is an issue of debate now) .

Genre

• In relation to literature, a genre is a French word that means ‘type’ or ‘kind’. It refers to specific literary forms, especially classic genres of fiction, drama and poetry/ or alternatively of tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric and satire. There are also subgenres: for example, within fiction we have: novel, short story, … • In relation to language study, the term is used differently. Bakhtin, for example, used the term ‘speech genres’ , to describe ‘relatively stable types’ of spoken utterance or written text that have developed within ‘each sphere in which language is used.’(qtd in Allington and Hewings p. 59). •  Building on Following speech theory, Carolyn Miller argued that each genre is a social action that one carries out through writing.

For example, writing a book review would mean carrying out the social action of

reviewing a book.

Bakhtin and Miller, sociolinguists now define genres ‘according to their function, formal characteristics and/or rhetorical purposes (Swann et al, 2004 p.124) (qtd p. 60).

Look in depth into the comparison of the two genres of writing a diary, and writing a blog online as discussed in Reading A, pp.77-82 + the Comment on the reading pp. 60-5.

Literacy practices

• Linguists have moved from thinking about texts as arrangements signs , through consideration of the meanings carried by choices of font, to thinking about texts as actions fulfilling typical social needs .

• One example is the letter of recommendation, a letter that depends less on how it is written than on who it is from. This takes us back to Bourdieu’s example on the order given ty the caption to the soldier in Chapter 1.

‘..authority comes to language from outside’(Bourdieu, 1992 [1975], p.109, qtd p.66).

Are you reading this information in a book, online? Are you using a computer or a piece of paper to take notes, to search websites for information? Are you alone? What are your purposes for learning???

See Activity 2.6

• • See Activity 2.7

Literacy practices are not only associated with studying, they are also closely related to other domains such as work, religion, entertainment, etc.

Literacy practices depend on:  Context: do you read alone, in company or collaboratively?

 The medium: do digital devices, such as mobile phones or computers play a role?

 The form: when you write do you use full sentences, notes, symbols, or other forms of notation For example, Do you write ‘u’ or ‘you’, ‘brb’ or ‘I will be right back’, ‘OMG!’ or ‘Oh My GOD!’? Do you write ‘marhaba,’ ‘hello’ or the Arabic spelling in your whatsapp msg  ? (p.69) See more examples on literacy activities and different practices pp. 69-70 +

Literacy practices

Explore reading B for ideas on how postcards are an index of how ordinary people

organize life

through study of

personal communication

and how people

document life in diaries .

• See Comment on Reading The Times of India on pp.70-71 English-language texts are taken up in bilingual contexts as part of literacy practices. Reading an English newspaper

identity of the reader

.

text is used to perform functions that have implications for the social

o Many people find reading to be a useful way of managing the boredom and discomfort of waiting; it turns a part of the day that might otherwise be considered wasted into an opportunity for learning.

o The physical size of a newspaper is an effective barrier between oneself and the world, excluding unwanted attention and providing an often welcome sense of privacy … focusing attention on a text makes it socially acceptable to refrain from interacting with other people. o The language of the text being read is highly significant. While an outsider might asume that someone who chooses to read an English language newspaper in India is identifying himself with a foreign culture, this doesn’t reflect the complexities of language use and the use of Hindi, English and local languages in the country. Northern India is for example called the ‘Hindi belt’ whereas English is generally associated with middle and upper classes and in some cases reading in English is an index of aspirations. Sometimes it is simply expressing an affiliation( or striving to maintain one) with the world of administration and business.

Multimodal literacy and cultural difference

• See p. 72 and activity 2.9, p.73-76 Meaning of image is a some of the meaning of: words, facial expressions, dress code, speech bubble shape in a cartoon • Figures to discuss are 2.10, 2.11

See Meaning of shapes

In contemporary comics, rectangles signify that any words within them are to be understood as narration, oval ‘speech bubbles’ with sharp tails signify that any words within them are to be understood as spoken aloud by the characters to whom the tails point, and cloud-like ‘think-bubbles’ trailing lines of little circles signify that any words within them are to understood as the unspoken of the characters towards whom the circles trail (p.74) Interaction between the visual and the verbal Through analysis of some images, it should be clear that making sense of text involves recognizing the complex interactions of both visual elements and verbal elements, and relating these to contextual knowledge. What we understand, then, depends not only upon the image itself, but also on context and on the other images or words on the page (p.75)