Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise

Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy

Cheryl Geisler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136690839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The first full-length account integrating both the cognitive and sociological aspects of reading and writing in the academy, this unique volume covers educational research on reading and writing, rhetorical research on writing in the disciplines, cognitive research on expertise in ill-defined problems, and sociological and historical research on the professions. The author produced this volume as a result of a research program aimed at understanding the relationship between two concepts -- literacy and expertise -- which traditionally have been treated as quite separate phenomena. A burgeoning literature on reading and writing in the academy has begun to indicate fairly consistent patterns in how students acquire literacy practices. This literature shows, furthermore, that what students do is quite distinct from what experts do. While many have used these results as a starting point for teaching students "how to be expert, " the author has chosen instead to ask about the interrelationship between expert and novice practice, seeing them both as two sides of the same project: a cultural-historical "professionalization project" aimed at establishing and preserving the professional privilege. The consequences of this "professionalization project" are examined using the discipline of academic philosophy as the "site" for the author's investigations. Methodologically unique, these investigations combine rhetorical analysis, protocol analysis, and the analysis of classroom discourse. The result is a complex portrait of how the participants in this humanistic discipline use their academic literacy practices to construct and reconstruct a great divide between expert and lay knowledge. This monograph thus extends our current understanding of the rhetoric of the professions and examines its implications for education.

PART

I

CORE CONCEPTS

CHAPTER

1

LITERACY AMONG EXPERTS IN THE ACADEMY: THE ACADEMIC PROFESSIONS

The ability to read and write are usually regarded as a birthright in this country. The transmission of reading skills to the general public has been part of the agenda for American education since the initiation of the public school movement (Cook-Gumperz, 1986; Graff, 1979; Soltow & Stevens, 1981). What we mean by that right, however, has changed with time and place. As Resnick and Resnick (1977) were the first to point out, expectations for literacy skills have not been constant. When Protestant reformers achieved nearly universal literacy in England and Sweden in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, they considered the recall of familiar texts without interpretation or writing to be an adequate measure of literacy skills. Educators in the elite technical schools of France, by contrast, demanded the interpretation and application of novel ideas (Resnick & Resnick, 1977).

Despite this historical variation, schooling in the United States has been premised on the idea that there is a single literacy that should be made available to all. And with the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) campaigns for literacy, this assumption was extended transnationally into developing nations (UNESCO, 1976). These efforts, as Resnick and Resnick (1977) pointed out, represented the first attempt to apply elite standards to an educational system with more universal coverage. That is, governments began to expect for the first time that all citizens should learn the complex skill of acquiring new information from text.

This demand for universal elite literacy has had consequences for the two sets of people who regularly coexist and interact with each other in the academy: those academic professionals who make a permanent living through research and teaching, and those temporary students who pass through and pay a fee for knowledge and skills. In particular, as we see in chapter 2, treating the first group as the “experts” in the academy and the second group as the “novices” has appeared to simplify the issue of what students should be taught about reading and writing. Indeed, the unspoken assumption has often been that students’ literacy mirrors or should mirror the literacy practices of the academic professions.

What are the literacy practices of the academic professions? This chapter attempts a preliminary answer to this question by comparing a cultural ideal, the autonomous text, with the practical realities in the particular case of the sciences. Although this cultural ideal is far from an accurate portrayal of what scientists do when they read and write, as is shown later, it does shape their reading and writing practices in very complicated ways.

THE CULTURAL IDEAL OF THE AUTONOMOUS TEXT

Until recently, most academics, including both the researchers who studied literacy practices and the everyday users of those practices, believed that the academic professions produced and interpreted texts in line with the cultural ideal of the autonomous text—a belief that a text can stand independent of its context of production or interpretation, that a text can mean the same thing to all readers in all ages. A growing body of evidence suggests, however, that this is, at best, a troubled ideal.

The Cultural Ideal

Without a great deal of thought, most people assume that the literacy practices of the academy are based on a mix of three kinds of skill: an advanced facility with words, a strong sense of logic, and a deep understanding of a specialized domain of knowledge. In this model, academics are expected to read and write their way to the construction of knowledge by establishing valid facts using the methods of their fields, putting these facts together to construct an argument according to the general canons of logic, and then clothing the results in a language that would enable readers to understand them clearly. The responsibilities for these skills were neatly divided among three distinct fields: Specialized fields would contribute the content, the field of logic would determine the structure, and the field of rhetoric would determine the form.

Under this division of labor, literacy seems to involve the construction and interpretation of “autonomous texts” (Olson, 1977). That is, under the ideal of the autonomous text, we expect readers to be able to understand texts without reference to the contexts in which they are produced or interpreted. What texts mean is taken to be equivalent to what texts say. Good reading will reflect the logical analysis of the actual meaning of the words explicitly represented on the page. And good texts will mean the same things to all readers in all ages. Such autonomous texts appear to be well suited to the construction of universal principles—the main business of the academy—and thus are often taken to represent a major cultural advance over the simple orality they replaced.

Not surprisingly, scholars believed that this ideal literacy was rooted in the same soil that nourished the Western tradition as a whole: fifth-century Athens. In 1963, Havelock first made this connection by claiming that Plato’s perfect Republic was fundamentally a literate creation. Outlawing the poets of an interactive oral culture, according to Havelock, Plato posited a higher reality of visible stable forms. In doing so, the argument ran, Plato was unconsciously moving to replace an oral with a literate culture.

In the same year, Goody and Watt (1963) extended this analysis by comparing preliterate thought, as revealed by a variety of anthropological studies, with the literate thought exhibited by the early Greeks. Of particular interest was the difference in attitude toward history. According to Goody and Watt, preliterate societies, who rely on oral transmission, continually and unconsciously readjust their histories to reflect current social facts. As an example, when the chiefdoms of the state of Gonja in Ghana were reduced from seven to five in the course of a generation, the number of sons attributed to the founder of the state by oral genealogies showed a corresponding reduction from seven to five. Other oral genealogies showed a similar pattern. According to Goody and Watt, this preliterate attitude toward history was fundamentally changed by the advent of widespread literacy. The historian Thucydides, for example, departed from the custom of simply recording oral accounts of events and instead tried to adjudicate among them by detecting inconsistencies. In doing so, he was, like Plato, arguing for the replacement of an oral and changeable tradition with a more stable and autonomous tradition of texts.

In 1977, David Olson attempted to extend this theory of a “great divide” between orality and literacy to describe the changes that occur when individuals learn to read and write. According to Olson, the literate tradition of the Greeks culminated in 17th-century England with the essayist technique articulated by John Locke (1690/1982) and espoused by the newly formed Royal Society of London (Sprat, 1667/1966). In this new essayist tradition, the interpretation of texts was expected to be independent of the contexts in which they were produced. That is, unlike conversation, texts were expected to be understandable without independent knowledge of who was speaking, with what intention, and for what purpose. Instead, meaning was assumed to be represented explicitly and, as Olson first coined the term, autonomously in the text itself.

This historical development of literate thought, according to Olson (1988), is repeated each generation as students learn to read and write. According to this developmental hypothesis, students come to school with a preliterate sense of language as contextualized “utterance”; they have made sense of language by relying solely on the conversational context in which words are used. As a consequence, they pay little attention to the actual meaning of words or the syntax that holds them together. Learning to read, then, means acquiring not only decoding skills but also skills of decontextualized interpretation, of finding meaning in the text rather than in the context.

The early work of the linguist Chafe on the differences between spoken and written language added support to this developmental hypothesis. In a series of ingenious studies of people’s retelling of the story in a silent movie, Chafe (1980) had found that the basic unit of oral language was not the same as the written sentence. Extending this analysis, Chafe (1982, 1985) later pointed to a host of other features which distinguished spoken and written discourse in terms of relative involvement with either the speaker or the content. Although Chafe later amended his position in ways more fully described later, this early stage of his argument gave credence to the idea that students who move from a predominantly oral conversational context at home to a predominantly written textual context in school are making a transition from contextualized utterance to autonomous text.

Unknown to Western researchers until relatively recently, the work of Soviet psychologist Vygotsky and his student, Luria, also give both empirical and theoretical support to the theory of autonomous text. In his best known work, Thought and Language, not published in the West until 1962, Vygotsky suggested that written speech represented the far end on a continuum of explicitness. Vygotsky placed what he called inner speech on the other end of this continuum and oral speech in the middle. Writing presented the greatest challenge to students, according to Vygotsky, because it required the deliberate restructuring of their personal webs of meaning from inner speech along the more explicit lines demanded by written texts.

Attempting to test Vygotsky’s (1962) theory by studying the impact of literacy and schooling, A. R. Luria performed a series of experiments on peasants in the early stages of collectivization in the USSR. The results of these studies showed that peasants with just a few weeks of schooling exhibited significantly different reasoning strategies than their preliterate counterparts. For instance, when asked to reason syllogistically, preliterates tended to rely on contextual evidence to draw conclusions. Those newly literate, however, were able to draw the correct conclusions by relying only on the abstract propositions encoded in the premises given to them by the experimenter (Luria, 1976). Thus these peasants seem to have made the transition from contextualized utterance to decontextualized text in just the way Olson (1988) suggested.

Overall, then, research and scholarship published in the decades following the seminal works of Havelock (1963) and Goody and Watt (1963) continued to explore the implications of an ideal of literacy as autonomous text. In educational research, this model was used to develop instructional strategies to help students with difficulties they had in learning to read and write. Rubin (1980), influenced by an early version of Olson’s (1988) article, provided a taxonomy of seven dimensions of difference between oral and written language and suggested a program of instruction that would introduce them to readers one at a time in “manageable steps.” Perfetti (1987), although acknowledging some similarities between speech and print, nevertheless assumed that learning to read was hard because of the decontextualized nature of print. And in the area of writing, Flower (1979) used the evidence of the great divide to describe the changes needed to move from “writer-based” to “reader-based” prose. Finally Bereiter and Scardamalia (1982) described learning to write as a process of moving “from conversation to composition,” and proposed procedural facilitation as a way of supporting this transition.

Troubles with the Ideal

Troubles with the ideal of the autonomous text became evident almost immediately. For one thing, even though this model of academic literacy had become almost commonplace, it flew in the face of an older tradition of rhetoric. According to this classical tradition, the finding of arguments, the organization of arguments, and the wording of arguments were all language-bound activities and all, therefore, within the proper domain of rhetoric. Eventually, this domain was carved up: Invention moved into the empirical sciences. Organization moved into logic. In fact, by the mid 20th century, style was the only concern remaining within the legitimate purview of rhetoric—or composition, its modern counterpart (Halloran, 1983; Howell, 1956, 1971; Kennedy, 1963, 1972, 1980; Ong, 1958/1974; Young, 1980).

This arrangement remained unquestioned until the arrival in the late 1950s of what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958/1969) called “the new rhetoric.” These new rhetoricians challenged the assumption that right thinking was the proper domain of formal logic and instead attempted to recover the rhetorical tradition of argumentation and reasoning. Toulmin (1958), in particular, questioned the assumption that a single formal logic could be depended upon to adjudicate truth regardless of context. He suggested instead that the criteria for judging an argument varied from field to field. The reasons that would convince a physicist, for example, would be different than those demanded by an art historian. And what would convince an art historian would fail to move a literary critic. Following up on Toulmin’s insight, a number of contemporary scholars have been investigating the arguments of specific fields particularly as represented in written texts (Bazerman & Paradis, 1991).

Perhaps the most significant blow to the ideal of the autonomous text came with the publication of Scribner and Cole’s (1981) monumental study of the cognitive effects of literacy. Taking advantage of the co-occurrence in Liberia of three literacies—a Western-style schooled literacy, a nonschooled Qur’anic alphabetic literacy, and nonschooled syllabic Vai literacy—Scribner and Cole set out to examine differences among five groups: the nonliterates, Vai script monoliterates, Arabic monoliterates, Vai-Arabic biliterates, and the English schooled. They used a battery of experimental tasks similar in spirit to those used earlier in the century by Luria: geometric sorting tasks to test abstract reasoning, classification tasks to test taxonomic categorization, recall tasks to test memory, syllogistic reasoning tasks to test logic, and a name interchange task to test for language objectivity. The results of these comparisons were relatively straightforward: Exposure to Western-style schooled literacy consistently predicted performance on higher order skills, but exposure to nonschooled literacies did not. Simply becoming literate, then, appeared to be unrelated to the kinds of reasoning skills assumed by the ideal of the autonomous text. Becoming literate in the specific context of Western schools, however, was highly correlated with these skills.

Scribner and Cole’s (1981) results undercut the ideal of the autonomous text by showing that literacy did not necessarily lead to a single set of cognitive effects. Other studies also began to question the exact relationship between literacy and the orality against which it had been compared. Linguists—most notably Chafe himself (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1987) and Tannen (1985, 1987)—quickly realized that they had been comparing a particular form of orality, conversational interaction among peers, with a particular form of literacy, academic prose. Once the range of discourse forms was broadened, the results were less clear.

Chafe and Danielewicz (1987), for example, found that two oral forms, conversation and lectures, could indeed be distinguished from two literate forms, personal letters and academic papers, on a variety of linguistic features, including the range and level of vocabulary and the length and connection among intonation units. In oral discourse forms, these features appeared to be noticeably reduced as speakers made more limited and colloquial word choices in shorter intonation units typically connected by nothing more complex than coordinating conjunctions. These features, Chafe and Danielewicz suggested, might well arise from the need to construct oral language on the fly. Other features more closely related to the ideal of the autonomous text, however, showed different results. In terms of the relative involvement or detachment of the speaker, oral conversation was more closely matched with written letters in showing high involvement, whereas the two discourses of the academy, lectures and papers, tended to exhibit more autonomy from context.

Symmetrically, a set of even earlier studies of traditional societies indicated the presence in oral forms of autonomous features previously attributed exclusively to written texts. In an analysis provided by Akinnaso (1982), for example, a diviner’s chant was shown to have relied for its power on decontextualized meanings that transcended the immediate situation in which the divination was requested. According to Akinnaso, the chanter’s discourse adopted a detached interaction style that invited no participation by the client. The chanter produced a highly integrated structure and used a specialized vocabulary that could be reproduced in form, content, and style in a wide range of circumstances. And, as Akinnaso pointed out, these are all autonomous features thought previously to be the exclusive domain of literate discourse.

Other studies of the discourse of traditional societies indicate that autonomous linguistic codes often exist side by side with more contextualized codes, both in oral form. Comaroff (1975), for example, found that Tshidi orators provided political commentary using a more formal linguistic code of well-known formulas and implicit reference when they were stating eternally shared values; they resorted to a more explicit and personal linguistic code to discuss the actual and controversial actions taken by the king. Similarly, Salmond (1975) found that the Maori tradition of oratory combined a formal discourse, used to establish relative prestige among competing groups, with a more informal discourse, used to wield real political influence. Among the Malagasy in Madagascar, Keenan (1975) found that an elaborate ceremonial speech was used in the initial stages of marriage negotiations to esta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I CORE CONCEPTS
• 1 Literacy Among Experts in the Academy: The Academic Professions
• The Cultural Ideal of the Autonomous Text
• Discourse and Knowledge in the Sciences
• Writing in the Sciences
• Reading in the Sciences
• The Competing Interests of Writers and Readers in the Sciences
• 2 Literacy Among Novices in the Academy: Students in School
• Discourse and Knowledge in the Schools
• Reading in the Schools
• Writing in the Schools
• Literacy and Learning in the Schools
• Literacy and Learning at Crossed Purposes in the Schools
• 3 Expertise as Cognitive Abstraction
• The Legacy of General Problem Solving
• Problem Solving with Physics Word Problems
• Problem Solving in More Ill-Defined Domains
• Cognitive Aspects of Expertise
• 4 Expertise as Professionalized Knowledge
• The Rise of the Modern Professions
• The Academic Guarantee of Expertise
• The Professionalization of Expertise
• The Impact on American Schooling
• 5 Literacy and the Nature of Expertise
• The Dual Problem Space Framework
• The Differential Development of Dual Problem Spaces in the Academy
• Literacy and the Great Divide
• The Problem of Reflection: Issues for This Book
• PART II STUDYING SPACE AND TIME
• 6 Observing Writers with Protocol Data
• Protocol Data as a Practical Matter
• Protocol Data as a Theoretical Matter
• 7 Modeling Writing as Activity
• The Published Data
• The Cognitive Process Model
• An Alternative: Modeling Cultural Activity
• Recovering the Cognitive Tradition
• PART III STUDIES AT A SINGLE SITE OF ACADEMIC LITERACY: PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS
• 8 Design and Analytic Framework for These Studies
• Design for the Data-Gathering Effort
• Framework for Analysis
• 9 The Genre of the Philosophic Essay: Transforming Readers’ Experience
• Stylistic Shifts to the Contemporary Philosophic Essay
• Space/Time Dimensions of the Philosophic Essay
• Comparison with Indigenous Forms
• Comparison with Historical Forms
• The Social and Historical Character of the Philosophic Essay
• 10 Composing the Philosophic Essay: Transforming Everyday Conversation
• Design
• The Activities of Composing
• The Knowledge Representations
• The Goals
• Conversation and Socially Configured Representations
• Across the Great Divide
• 11 Representing Philosophical Ethics: Transforming Everyday Narrative
• Analytic Techniques
• Overall Patterns
• Jeff’s Use of Narrative
• Roger’s Use of Narrative
• Janet’s Use of Narrative
• Leslie’s Use of Narrative
• Relative Commitment to Formal and Indigenous Culture
• Cultural Slippage and the Professionalization of Self
• 12 At the Boundaries of Expertise: Transforming Apprenticeship in an Instructional Situation
• The Classroom Situation
• Quantitative Analysis
• Narrative Analysis
• The Tacit Integration of Academic Expertise
• Problems with the Apprenticeship Model
• PART IV REFLECTION AND REFORM
• 13 Reflecting on Academic Literacy
• March 1990: A Four-Layered Account of Research
• Summer 1993: Reflections on Academic Literacy
• 14 Reforming Academic Literacy
• Rethinking Literacy Research
• Reforming Academic Practice
• Reshaping American Schooling
• Appendix A. Chronological Bibliography of the Cognitive Process Tradition
• Appendix B. Directions for “Thinking-Aloud” Protocols
• Appendix C. Interview Guide for Experts and Novices
• Appendix D. Interview Guide for the Teacher
• Appendix E. Interview Guide for the Students
• Appendix F. The Career of William James
• Appendix G. Participants’ Final Texts
• Appendix H. Rules for the Analysis of Text Structure
• Appendix I. Chronological Listing of Participants’ Narratives
• Appendix J. Rules for Aggregating Conversational Interchanges
• Appendix K. Coding the World of Discourse
• Appendix L. Week-by-Week Analysis of the Class
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index