Handbook of Reading Research, Volume II

Rebecca Barr, Michael L. Kamil, Peter B. Mosenthal, P David Pearson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351796736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A comprehensive overview of important contemporary issues in the field of reading research from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s, this well-received volume offers readers an examination of literacy through a variety of lenses--some permitting microscopic views and others panoramic views. A veritable "who's who" of specialists in the field, chapter authors cover current methodology, as well as cumulative research-based knowledge.Because it deals with society and literacy, the first section provides the broadest possible view of literacy. The second section defines the range of activities culturally determined to be a part of the enterprise known as literacy. The third focuses on the processes that individuals engage in when they perform the act of reading. The fourth section visits the environment in which the knowledge that comprises literacy is passed on from one generation to the next. The last section, an epilogue to the whole enterprise of reading research, provides apt philosophical reflection.

PART ONE

Society and Literacy

Section Editor: Rebecca Barr

1 THE SENSE OF BEING LITERATE: HISTORICAL AND CROSS-CULTURAL FEATURES

Shirley Brice Heath

It is the huge, high harmony that sounds

A little and a little, suddenly,

By means of a separate sense. It is and it

Is not and, therefore, is.

from “A Primitive Like an Orb”
Wallace Stevens*

Any “separate sense” that enables individuals both to feel and to create harmony within their daily world comes in different forms and works in different ways. In the relatively few remaining traditional societies that have not experienced penetration by the institutions of industrial and urban growth, individuals depend on their primary senses to keep harmony in their daily lives (Goody, 1987). They listen for and feel climatic warnings, watch for signs of anger in their neighbors, or read footprints and bark thickness both to recount and predict animal behaviors.

In industrialized nations, neither direct experience nor reliance on immediate sensory feedback can go far enough toward giving a sense of harmony. The world is now the village—touched daily by global economic forces and geopolitical concerns. Here the writings of others—distant in history, geography, and profession—provide information, recommend actions, and promote political and philosophical orientations. Having access to such knowledge and being able to display it in appropriate oral and written forms suggest that an individual is in control and has power. Thus, the idea prevails in the Western world that harmony comes most readily for those who can call on their literateness to help them stabilize and control their world.

This chapter considers the very broad question of what having a sense of being literate means historically and cross-culturally. In this chapter, being literate goes beyond having literacy skills that enable one to disconnect from the interpretation or production of a text as a whole, discrete elements, such as letters, graphemes, words, grammar rules, main ideas, and topic sentences. The sense of being literate derives from the ability to exhibit literate behaviors. Through these, individuals can compare, sequence, argue with, interpret, and create extended chunks of spoken and written language in response to a written text in which communication, reflection, and interpretation are grounded.

Though we make some statements about this issue in the Western world in general, the focus of discussion in this chapter will be on the United States. In the first section, we take up the historical bases for the development and promotion of literate behaviors as highly interpersonal and interdependent. The second section briefly contrasts these bases with some principles of learning in formal education, especially in terms of what these mean among minorities within the United States in the late twentieth century. A topic for special consideration here is ways that schools link critical thinking with literacy skills. The third section presents the conditions of learning language and defining thinking for some minority groups within the United States. The chapter closes with a suggested research and teacher education agenda that will move attention beyond literacy skills to literate behaviors.

Since at least the height of Greek civilization, those individuals who have looked upon themselves as literate have differed markedly from those who have used reading and writing merely as tools to achieve somewhat limited ends within narrow occupational roles. Being learned has continued to be central to being literate, with the implication that the learning that makes an individual literate goes beyond matters of daily sustenance and labor. In the Middle Ages, knowing Latin well enough to read, write, and speak it, regardless of the vernacular one spoke, marked an individual as literate. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, the term came to be not so much a marker of self-identity as a descriptor to dichotomize the population into literates who could read in the vernacular languages and illiterates who could not. It was also during this period that the Anglo world began the trend toward blaming those who did not learn to read and to speak preferred dialects for their lack of individual initiative (Jones, 1953). By the end of the nineteenth century, the term literacy emerged to refer primarily to measures of certain skills of reading and writing among large populations.

For individuals, being literate continues to carry the meaning of having achieved learning through special efforts to gain access to knowledge not generally available in the direct experiences of daily life. This focus on individual initiative in developing a sense of being literate fits well with the American drive “to become ones own person, almost to give birth to oneself” and to be leery of communal associations that might constrict individualism (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985, p. 82). For Americans, the fact that being able to read enables the individual to transcend time and space and to liberate the mind and spirit has been a critical component of a literate life (Cremin, 1970). By the end of the nineteenth century, the ability to write extended discourse, rather than merely provide a signature or engage in numerical calculations, clearly connoted the possibility of an unencumbered private self free from the limitations of the immediate environment. The state of being literate removes the individual from dependence on only immediate senses and direct contacts.

Yet since the days of Cicero, those who have been most literate have also been drawn to create opportunities to organize themselves into communities of literates and to talk within these groups about what they learned from what they read and how their writing might spread knowledge and promote actions among others. These close communal associations around texts—especially those of religious or legal content—have encouraged individuals to pursue their own private reflections about the life of the individual within the state and, indeed, within the cosmos. For those cut off by gender, race, or class from frequent face-to-face interactions with established and elite contemporary and contiguous communities, writing has provided a channel of communication for building communal links on paper. Women, blacks, and others with limited access often substituted their journals, diaries, and letters for direct oral exchange with a community of like-minded literates.

When formal schooling for the masses emerged in the United States as the primary institution for the spread of literacy, both communal reinforcements for being a literate individual and its strong base of support through oral communication began to diminish (Ong, 1983, pp. 126–129). Both the artifacts and personnel of schools supported sequenced approaches to learning to read and write that defined intelligence largely through the acquisition of knowledge transmitted in schools and displayed in solo performances. In its drive to instruct, measure, and prescribe the individual, the school jettisoned much of the learning in communities and the linkages between private self and public commitments that had supported literate behaviors for centuries. Measures of literateness became closely tied to individual achievements in reaching the higher levels of the formal education pyramid (Oxenham, 1980).

Ironically, even as national governments and theorists of modernization stressed strong connections between schooling and the national political and economic welfare, they followed educational models of developed nations to place extraordinary emphasis on individuals as solo learners in public schools. In developing nations around the world in the twentieth century, the larger polity and its bureaucratic replicas at local levels have promoted the benefits that could result from individuals competing against each other for academic excellence within schools (Hayes, 1965; Experimental World Literacy Program, 1973). Only in the 1960s did some national literacy campaigns and out-of-school programs begin to break this school model by linking reading and writing to social relations and new sets of cultural practices (Amove & Graff, 1987; Friere & Macedo, 1987).

When, in the last quarter of the 20th century, critics within the developed nations pointed out the failure of schools to move large numbers of students beyond a minimal level of competence in literacy, national political figures stressed the current shortcomings of schooling and chided educators for letting standards slide from past eras of mythical high achievement. Their reference points for earlier levels of reading and writing, as well as the conditions for learning and practicing reading and writing, were often more myth than fact and often failed to consider the historical conditions for literate learning before and beyond schools (Miller, 1988). Critics of national levels of literacy focused almost completely on schools and hardly at all on the earlier important roles that literate behaviors had played in other societal institutions, such as family, church, and community organizations.

Implicit in these critiques and appeals to the national conscience has been the assumption that individuals and institutions alike hold similar notions about what being literate means. Yet few studies of the contributions of schools to national literacy levels have moved beyond definitions of literacy to consider literate attributes (but see Carnegie Forum, 1986). Educators and social scientists who attempted to identify literate attributes often shifted the focus from being to having, and literacy skills— discrete and mechanistic tools that make certain actions possible—went into definitions that focused on acquisition—learning to read—and not on retention or expansion of abilities, knowledge, and habits associated with reading and writing to learn.

Yet those who have a sense of being literate readily acknowledge that their capabilities extend beyond recognizing and recreating (either orally or in writing) words, sounds, and letters to include presentation of self-in-revision interdependent with other speakers and readers as well as with a variety of written texts. The literateness of any individual is also only somewhat stable; it is dynamic, iterative, and sometimes erratic and daring in its representations. On some occasions, those who think of themselves as literate can read a poem and see through it to both personal and universal meanings; at other times, the poets words fall like dry chips with no connection to life. A word spelled or even identified and pronounced correctly at one point slips away into uncertainty on other occasions. Literates do not trust with certainty that the right words will come to sum up the essence of a meeting or to launch a charity campaign. Those who assume a sense of being literate in modern postindustrial nations know that they depend on far more than separate and individual skills for their literate identities. Being literate depends on an essential harmony of core language behaviors and certain critical supporting social relations and cultural practices.

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Any sociocultural identification that extends into the core values of a society and its individuals has deep historical roots. Within those Western democracies that came early to industrial and urban life, ideals about the relationship of literacy to economic progress for the nation and social advancement for the individual became tightly intertwined with industrial growth and political stability. Compulsory graded schooling, national textbooks, and a cadre of professional teachers became natural companions to factories, election processes, and an expanded market for consumer goods. As former colonies became independent nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they followed the example of industrialized nations and hired teachers, built schools, and distributed basic texts to the young in the hope of increasing worker production and consumer interest to build the nations role in the world marketplace.

Yet closer looks at the history of literacy in the industrialized nations of the West make it clear that developing a sense of being literate rather than simply acquiring the rudimentary literacy skills of reading and writing entailed far more than schools alone could give (see R. L. Venezky, “The Development of Literacy in the Industrialized Nations of the West,” p. 46 of this volume). What has supported the development of a sense of being literate—of going beyond mere acquisition of reading and writing skills to expand these abilities with no apparent practical payoffs? In recent decades, when the school has centered literacy instruction on competition among autonomous, self-responsible individuals, what communal reinforcements have there been for literate behaviors?

Some hints of the subtle factors involved have come from historical studies of the development of habits of reading and of reading communities. Those who developed a sense of being literate were communities of elite groups, holding themselves and their knowledge and power apart from the masses. Churchmen, political leaders, and intellectuals—males released from responsibility for their own daily sustenance—came together to make meaning of written words. They did so through long periods of time for talking about what the texts meant, for generating ideas and actions not explicitly written in the text. Their habits of reading and talking were intertwined with specific ways of verifying and thinking about knowledge, because they were at leisure to become a community of talkers who could go beyond what texts said to what they meant for action, ideas, and ideology (Clanchy, 1979; Eisenstein, 1979; Stock, 1983).

In the Middle Ages, the church protected elite special-interest groups that were committed to write, to cultivate the forms of language for written texts, and to debate the meaning of what they had learned through reading. Before the advent of printing, scribes laboriously provided the texts that elites studied and interpreted for the populace through the church and institutions of learning. Bishops and kings guarded the written word in the armor of specialized vocations and long terms of institutionalized learning that depended upon an existence apart from the daily exigencies of providing for a family, quarreling with the local innkeeper, or deciding on the site of the local well.

Until the end of the fourteenth century in Europe, a few elites were able to secure reading and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Part One Society and Literacy
• Part Two Task and Format Variables in Reading Research
• Part Three Constructs of Reader Process
• Part Four Literacy and Schooling
• Epilogue Understanding Progress in Reading Research
• Author Index
• Subject Index