Routledge Revivals: The Social Context of Literacy (1986)

Kenneth Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315279275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1986, this book looks at the impact of mass literacy on everyday life, discussing the fundamental differences between traditional oral cultures and contemporary industrialised societies where most people rely on complex combinations of oral and literate communication. There is also a detailed examination of the problems of the sub-literate minority with recommendations for future programmes of assistance. This book also provides a historical survey of the spread of literacy in British society from the Roman occupation onwards. In conclusion, the author discusses the impact of information technologies on people with limited basic skills.

1

Approaching literacy

Introduction

Most people can read and write fluently and are daily immersed in tides of print in the language they speak. What could be more natural, more taken-for-granted for this competent majority, than literacy? For them, there is usually no distinction between seeing a notice and reading it, and probably less effort expended in writing down an item on a shopping-list than calling it to mind in the first place. Moreover, there are few occasions in which competent adults are confronted with the limits of their reading and writing skills. Even if minor mistakes or failures occur, the repetition and redundancy built into written communication is capable of making the practical consequences unimportant. Should serious misunderstanding arise, it is often possible to save a situation simply by switching to speech and asking for spoken clarification.

There are other respects, too, in which individual and collective literacy tends to camouflage its own existence and makes itself ‘transparent’. On the individual level, most people quickly forget the details of the learning process and cannot remember the time before they could read or write. Although powers acquired during childhood expand and contract during adult life, only a few people become conscious of their extent and fewer still are compelled to make any active response to the changes. On the social level, every community in Britain has been thoroughly permeated by writing for several generations and the recollection of entirely oral communications has vanished for all but a handful of very old people.

When everyday circumstances which bring literacy under scrutiny do arise, the explanatory ideas lay people will probably find to hand are a set of unsophisticated, common-sense assumptions which have filtered down from the thousands of hours of schooling earmarked for acquiring and utilising literacy. Even those who leave school without the ability to read and write fluently are acutely aware of the prevailing expectations regarding these skills. They will have witnessed the rewards bestowed on academic high achievers; their teachers will have stressed literacy’s vocational importance and devoted much effort to inspiring interest in imaginative literature. There can be little doubt in the mind of any school leaver about the high ‘official’ valuation placed on literacy, and the endless assessments will have long since established his or her own position in the prestige ranking. While the results of the evaluation process are signalled in the clearest manner, precisely what it is that pupils have succeeded in or failed at often remains obscure to them. The vague and exaggerated notions many people take away from school about the extent of their capacities and incapacities can be compounded by an inability to carry out any self-diagnosis and the parallel belief that self-help is impossible. This induced helplessness turns out, in the long run, to be as much of a handicap as the absence of the basic skills themselves, and it leaves a great many of those who finally make their way to adult literacy schemes able to say in their initial interview nothing more explicit about their difficulties than, ‘I need help with my reading and writing’.

The superficial nature of popular beliefs about literacy also expresses itself in the widely held conviction that everybody who has attended school can (or at least should be able to) manage any written communication. An instance of this attitude is the confident statement with which Q.D. Leavis opened Fiction and the Reading Public: ‘In twentieth century England, not only every one can read, but it is safe to add that every one does read’ (1932, 3). Such misconceived views are sustained by more than the individual smugness of the academically successful. There is a corporate complacency about literacy in Britain that reflects the huge economic and political investments that have been made in schooling, and also the comparatively early historical appearance of ‘mass’ literacy. This helps to close off many of the more searching questions that could be posed concerning the social functions and significance of literacy and illiteracy, and contributes directly to the social obstacle course that faces those who cannot read and write.¹

There is no specific academic or technical specialism entirely devoted to literacy that is able to disturb this complacency, and the published material is slighter and more scattered than the social importance of the topic deserves. Aspects of literacy and its problems are taken up at the margins of several disciplines, with the result that studies tend to deal, often unsystematically, only with selected aspects. In the editorial introduction to Literacy in Traditional Societies (1968, 1), Jack Goody remarks that recently developed media of communication have attracted much greater scholarly attention than the massive and cumulative impact on humankind of five millennia of reading and writing. By exactly how much, if at all, this imbalance has now been corrected is a question for keyword analysis and citation indexes to quantify, but a large measure of the credit for any discernible shift of emphasis should go to the pioneering and wide-ranging essay, ‘The consequences of literacy’, written by Goody himself and Ian Watt in 1963 and republished in his collection. The importance of this contribution lay in its willingness to cross academic boundaries and to relate general issues in a way that fostered mutual recognition among different explanatory traditions.

It is worth considering briefly the way in which some of these traditions have approached the topic of literacy. Goody’s lament for its academic neglect applies particularly to media and communication studies and also to the sociology of literature. Apparently sophisticated socio-historical theories of literary genres and printed media have been developed in these areas without, in the main, sufficient empirical attention having been given to the forms and levels of literacy they implicitly or explicitly assume readers to have possessed. Many of the conceptual skyscrapers dominating communications theory are thus totally lacking in foundations. In a variety of distinctive blends, the histoire du livre² and semiotic and structuralist analyses³ have promised a dismantling of the written text and/or an account of the social institutions in which it came to be produced, but they have done so without any special consideration of, for instance, differences in the character and level of the author’s and the readers’ literacies. With some honorable exceptions, such as the work of Walter J. Ong and the group known as the ‘Toronto school’, to whom we will return, the capacity of readers in contemporary societies to understand written discourse is generally taken for granted.

Literary criticism, too, has on the whole been unconcerned with literacy. According to Eagleton’s characterisation of critical theories (1983, 74), the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century were preoccupied with authors and authorship, while English criticism in the aftermath of Leavis and the American New Criticism was exclusively interested in the text itself. Only with the arrival from the continent of ‘reception theory’ did English-speaking critics possess a unified framework in which to deal with the imaginative role and interpretive capacities readers bring to literary texts. Reception theory argues that even the most explicit text contains ambiguities which force readers to resort to methods and conventions of interpretation brought from beyond the text itself.⁴

Those who turn to linguistics for insights into literacy are immediately confronted by a great deal of technical expertise and empirical research experience, most of which remains uncodified. The reason for this lies in the belief among many linguists, inherited from nineteenth-century theorists and reaffirmed by important twentieth-century figures such as Saussure, Jakobson and Bloomfield, that spoken language has a historical and explanatory primacy. Although a shift of emphasis is probably under way with the rise of such specialisms as discourse analysis,⁵ literacy is still widely regarded as an applied field that raises few issues of theoretical significance.

Allusions to the importance of literacy in the development of social and political institutions are common in works of social theory, but the treatment is often cursory. In older works, the historical advent of literacy was significant mainly as marking the point at which historians were able to take over from archaeologists. It sometimes also served as the basis of quite arbitrary judgements about the threshold of ‘civilisation’.⁶ In recent works, literacy commonly functions as a convenient empirical measure of the level of economic and social development in a society, by-passing a variety of unresolved theoretical issues. Of the more considered socio-historical contributions, two examples must suffice. In a short work published in 1966, Talcott Parsons, the distinguished social theorist who dominated American sociology for more than twenty years, made sweeping claims for the role of literacy in human history. The argument of Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives is that there are three ‘very broad evolutionary levels’ in the emergence of human societies and that innovations in literacy are directly involved in the transition from one to another. The invention of writing systems marks the end of the ‘primitive’, oral stage of societal development and the dawn of the ‘intermediate’ stage. In the ‘archaic’ sub-type of intermediate societies, writing remains a craft specialisation confined to elite groups, often for religious or magical purposes. In the ‘advanced intermediate’ subtype, literacy is available for all the adult males of an upper social class. The final, ‘modern’ stage is marked by the institutionalisation of literacy among the entire adult population.

Exactly what explanatory role this evolutionary scheme fulfills is never made entirely clear by Parsons. Examples are given of the various social types (the Aztecs are placed in the ‘archaic intermediate’, and post-Confucian China in the ‘advanced intermediate’ categories) but there is no supporting empirical analysis and there is little reference to literacy in the rest of his voluminous writings.⁷ What Parsons does provide, however, is the suggestive idea that writing is crucial to the differentiation of the cultural from the social sphere because it permits ‘explicit cultural legitimation’, that is to say, it transforms oral myths and belief systems (which tend to have only a local significance) into a broadcastable, public form in which they can function as justifications for the increasing differentiation of social power, wealth and prestige.

Largely because of its abstract and fragmentary character, Parsons’s scheme for describing the stages in the evolution of mass literacy has not encouraged successors to apply or to elaborate it. The work of the economic historian of the Toronto school, Harold A. Innis, presents an interesting contrast in style and method. In Empire and Communications (1972) and The Bias of Communication (1951), Innis set out to document the role played by developments in the transmission of the written word in the creation and maintenance of monarchies and empires in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and Rome. Departing from established historical methods which tended to explain major shifts between media by fluctuations in levels of circulation or the size of audiences, Innis employed a distinctive set of figure-ground analogies which permitted him to move freely across different periods and settings. As Marshall McLuhan, who inherited Innis’s approach and pushed it to (and perhaps beyond) its limits, remarks in a foreword:

He saw that the figure-ground relation between written and oral is everywhere in a state of perpetual change. Material conditions can quickly reverse the relationships between written and oral so that, where literacy may be the ground of a culture in one phase, a sudden loss or access of written materials, for example, may cause the literate ground suddenly to dwindle to mere figure. (Innis, 1972, viii-ix)

When Innis turned to the twentieth-century competition between oral and literate modes, the figure-ground analogies could result in striking but oracular interpretations:

The clash between traditions based on the book and the newspaper contributed to the outbreak of war. The Treaty of Versailles emphasized self-determination as a governing principle and recognized the significance of language in the printing press. Consequently, it rapidly became outdated with the mechanization of the spoken word in the radio. Governmental influence over the press was extended to the radio. The loud speaker had decisive significance for the election of the Nazis.… The Second World War became to an important extent the result of a clash between the newspaper and the radio. (1972, 165)

Innis is a source of many suggestive and intriguing insights that are not always easy for others to use or develop. His acute sensitivity to the nuances of the oral mode is one of the more accessible aspects of his work, and it can be seen at its best unravelling the connections between trade, political institutions and philosophical ideas in the setting of classical Greece and Rome (1972). In contrast to Parsons, who promised a systematic, evolutionary theory of an orthodox kind that never actually materialised, Innis’s choice of explanatory style was too experimental and impressionistic for the majority of interested scholars outside Toronto. In the event, neither of their contributions attracted a lasting following nor provided the basis for empirical research programmes into literacy or orality.

This very selective survey suggests that the study of what Goody and Watt term ‘the technology of the intellect’ has been seriously hampered by its lack of fit with the prevailing academic division of labour. The topic’s sprawl across several disciplines results in identical issues being discussed in quite separate contexts with different vocabularies. On the other hand, not everyone that adopts (for example) a psychological perspective on literacy is seeking an answer to the same kind of question. The simple classification that follows attempts to introduce some preliminary order into the muddle. It sets out, firstly, to distinguish clearly the several different types of questions that can be posed in research devoted to literacy. Secondly, it maps the intellectual contexts in which each broad approach has developed. Thirdly, some of the more obvious constraints and limitations of each approach are outlined, and finally, some indication is given of the assumptions and commitments that distinguish the present work.

Competence studies

In the first of the three types of approach comes what may be termed ‘competence’ studies since they address the cognitive, linguistic and physiological foundations on which the individual builds reading and writing skills. Competence studies revolve around the question of how any individual is able to communicate via written symbols. From the various answers that are given to this question, an extensive instructional literature is derived made up of basal readers, reading schemes and exercises to improve reading speed, together with the fruits of ‘applied’ research on the readability of prose, the legibility of typefaces and layouts, and treatments of other technical aspects of producing and understanding texts.

The demand for reading instruction from within the school syllabus underlies, of course, much research and publication on literacy skills as such. The bulk of this work is carried out on behalf of teachers by investigators who have academic backgrounds in psychology or linguistics, and define their field of study as ‘reading research’. In common with other types of competence study, the principal objective in reading research remains the development of explanatory models of the encoding and decoding of texts. In order to arrive at a general understanding of the many complex processes involved, the implicit starting point for researchers is not this particular seven-year-old with poor vision in one eye who is attempting to read a timetable, but an abstract and idealised person operating with a ‘typical’ text, possibly in experimental conditions. Questions about the source of the text, how and why it has the form and contents it does, the significance of its information for the reader, the interests that its publication serves, why writers are trying to express themselves on a particular topic, all these are considerations that fall outside the ‘competence’ frame of analysis.

Now these points should not be interpreted as criticisms of reading research for not being something else, or as a veiled attack on theorising and experimentation. However, it is as well always to bear in mind, firstly, that theoretical explanations introduce and refer back to artificial entities (like ‘model’ readers), and secondly, that they concentrate on selected attributes of the models and necessarily leave a great deal unexplained. This can best be illustrated by examining the role played by readability formulas in reading research. Such formulas are widely used to quantify the difficulty a text will present to readers by calculating average word or sentence length, or assessing the simplicity of the vocabulary used. Most formulas rest on the premiss that it is possible to judge the difficulty of a text in an entirely generalised fashion so that comprehension is measured in a way that ignores, among other factors, the importance of the text content to the subject. This has the curious and anomalous result that while these formulas are routinely employed to make evaluations of pupil progress and school performance, they are actually counter-productive when it comes to creating comprehensible texts. As Davison and Kantor’s (1982) research indicates, adapting a text in a way that improves its readability score (by, for example, splitting complex sentences or simplifying vocabulary) may make the text harder rather than easier to understand. This is mainly because the classic measures of readability ignore several factors (logical ordering of ideas, background knowledge required of the reader) that are relevant to the practical difficulties encountered by real readers.

Although ‘competence studies’ employing school pupils as subjects have contributed much to the understanding of reading and reading difficulties, they embody a serious methodological limitation. In school, literacy skills are being exercised against a very specific backdrop of expectations and evaluations quite different to those that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Approaching literacy
• 2 Defining and measuring literacy and illiteracy
• 3 The historical perspective
• 4 Tutors and students
• 5 Illiteracy and work
• 6 Dealing with illiteracy
• 7 The future of literacy and literacies of the future
• Appendix 1 Details of sampling and interviewing procedures
• Appendix 2 English historical literacy rates
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index