ORALITY AND READING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: HOW TO GET THERE

Helio Rodrigues da Rocha

The order of the words reflects the order of thought

John Lyons

1. Deciding to learn a foreign language

Since 1994 I have been studying English language. Since then I started to think that to learn a foreign language (FL) is to become conscious of many useful things, mainly that, the learner’s brain is beginning to change the way of he/she has been constructed in his/her maternal language, I mean, how the speaker of a native language think himself/herself comprehends and represents himself/herself to the others. Then, my statement here is that how many language someone learns, how many construction this one will have. It means then that our linguistic identity varies from one language to another one. In such case, everyone that knows how to speak, to listen, to write and to read in a FL becomes two, three or much more, depending on how many languages he/she speaks.

By arguing that the language is the main chief on me, I would like to affirm that if I am something is because there is a language (in our case, many languages) which has given support for me (us) in the world. It means then that I am a subject because there is a language, and because of it there is a thought and then there is a mind behind it all. In fact, we all are thought and feelings. Then, for my argumentations to get clearer is useful to write here what are the conceptions for reading and what I am thinking by reading in this text.

According to Eni Orlandi, in her work Discurso e Leitura, “Leitura, vista em sua acepção mais ampla, pode ser entendida como “atribuição de sentidos” (...). Pode-se falar, então, em leitura tanto da fala cotidiana da balconista como do texto de Aristóteles”. Continua a autora, “Por outro lado pode significar “concepção”, e é nesse sentido que é usada quando se diz “leitura de mundo”. E ainda um pouco mais com Orlandi, “No sentido mais restrito, acadêmico, “leitura” pode significar a construção de um aparato teórico e metodológico de aproximação de um texto” (2001: 07). But for following my intentions in this text, I think is necessary to add that I am seeing reading as a “process of instauration of meaning” and as orality as reading are in the same level. If a read it is because I have know that word, that pronunciation and its diverse meanings, on the contrary, I am nor reading neither speaking, I am just imitating, as Indigenous people did while the priests celebrated the cult and did the signal of cross, for example. In this way, reading can be a pantomime, but in a different sense (to subvert, for example), no in the sense of not understanding what has been written, this is just an exercise of stupidity.

Then, pursuing my analysis, I would like to say that my main aim in this text is to clarify on me (what about the reader?) some points in the study of a foreign language and help other English teachers from Porto Velho city (the place where I started to study English and where I had the pleasure to meet brilliant professors and friends), to get stronger in his/her work and his/her everyday life.

2. Being part of a plan to learn English

Everyone who studies a second language knows how is important to speak, to read, to write and to understand the target language. The four abilities are necessary for all who desires to have a good domain of a FL. But we all know that there are different steps for each one of these knowledeges. In my case, they worked like this: first I had to learn how I should write the words ( in Brazilian portuguese there is no double letters in any word) and memorize its many meanings; after that I had to know the pronounce of it. For every step I had to create strategies. Let me tell you some of them.

The first strategy developed by me was put name in all things around me at home. It was very important because I saw the things and the name that instituted that thing among others. There I read the letters which composed that word and I knew, even in denotated sense, what it represented. The second step was to develop its pronounciation, and it happened through a record player - a disc man, for example - and then my personal achievement was being developed. And by use of letters of musics and its sounds I was able to follow my thoughts throughout the whole meaning of those words. Here, conotation was being developed too. A particular plan for gaining success in this particular activity was to know by heart the letter of any music or any poetry that I loved it.

In this way, “the orders of the words” were gaining my personal atributes - according to whom I leaded my attention - and constructed my way of thinking, as John Lyons affirms in his study of words, Language and Linguistics. After these strategies developed by me, I began to watch American and British films on DVD (Digital vVideo Disc). I followed some steps for watching them. Fisrt I watched it with with subtitles and after that I watched it with no subtitles, that was how I learnt how could I say that sentence, that phrasal verb or idiomatic expression. It was reading magazines, newspapers and comic books that I got have a useful comprehension of the texts and, at the same time, I learnt how to write too. So, my fluency in English was getting better from day to day. Now I can do interesting things using the language which I decided to learn. For example, I can have I chat with foreign people on internet, I can read international reports on newsapapers or on web, I can write against colonialist tendencies on travel writing on the Amazon, I can take part in congress and so on.

3. Knowing some methods and some approaches

In this par ot this text I will make a brief description of the basic principles and procedures of the most recognized methods for teaching/learning a foreign language. First of all, I think is useful to know what I want to say when I use the terms orality and reading. According to the Oxford English Dictionary "orality" is “the quality of being oral or orally communicated” or is a “preference for or tendency to use spoken forms of language”. Édouard Glissant, in his work, Caribbean Discourse (1992), affirms that “Orality...is inseparable from the body in movement.” Orality, I can say, works as a medium through which we can exchange information. Orality then is a process of communication between two or more people that can be perceived out and in the ourselves. Is it what is Glissant telling us? Everyone knows that everythings coomunicates. The question is: are we able to understand the world with its mulfarious cultures and forms? We try, we develops methods and approaches which give us chances to teach and to lear a FL, but we have to know that only the learner can decide to go on or to give up. The methods and approaches can get easier the process of learning a FL, but they can not decide for you. Let us make a review on these methods and approaches.

Certainly, students of a FL knows that the most recognized methods are: The Grammar-Translation, Silent Way, Suggestopedia, Direct Method, Audiolingual

ccording to Jill Kerper Mora

To say what is mind according to Geertz

ORALITY

“Orality...is inseparable from the body in movement.”

-- Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "orality" as “the quality of being oral or orally communicated” or as a “preference for or tendency to use spoken forms of language.” [1] The first definition affirms the term’s status as a medium: orality is a means through which we exchange information. The second definition, however, points to a problem in the way the term “orality” is used, both in media studies and in the everyday world: as existing in competition with other media forms. The framing of orality as a “preference” or “tendency” encourages its place within the paragone of the printed and spoken word, and suggests a single-sensory conception of media – that orality exists in a dialectical relationship with literacy, and that communication is a competition between eye and ear.

This comparative mode has been advocated most prominently by the Toronto School of Communication, which includes Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. For the Toronto School, writing – alphabetic writing in particular – is the key to evolutionary progress: that is, that literacy is “absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language itself,” [2] while orality is the marker of “tribal man.” [3] While McLuhan is certainly right to declare that a contrast with the “the written form” helps to “appreciate the nature of the spoken word,” [4] the characterization of literacy and orality as existing in an unequal dichotomy creates what Foley calls the “Great Divide” between the two genres, [5] and encourages the notion of orality as a primitive or undeveloped medium.

Despite the undeniable accomplishments of the Toronto School in media theory, recent scholars have questioned the usefulness of the literacy/orality dialectic. In the first instance, this questioning has manifested itself on the level of terminology: Bruce Rosenberg, for example, has argued that the false parallelism implied in Ong’s literacy/orality equation negates the potential for a sincere equivalency between the terms, and instead proposes the “literature/ oralature” pairing. Rosenberg’s neologism, however, does not come without problems of its own: not only does it preserve the dialectical relation of Ong’s more standard formulation, but it also employs a suffix that privileges the oral as an aesthetic – rather than a purely communicative – mode.

The issue of terminology is complicated further by Ong’s differentiation between primary and secondary orality, which he introduced in his 1971 essay entitled "The Literate Orality of Popular Culture.” Primary orality, for Ong, exists only among “persons totally unfamiliar with writing,” [6] while secondary orality occurs in cultures where technological development creates “a new orality...sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print.” [7] While Ong’s distinction provides a useful framework for characterizing different kinds of oral cultures, his model denies the potential for an equivalency between the printed and spoken word. For Ong, orality exists either in isolation from literacy, or as subservient to it: in the schema of primary and secondary orality, mutual interdependency between the two media is not a recognized possibility.

Thus, as J. Edward Chamberlin suggests, the Toronto School “has a lot to answer for in the characterization of oral cultures as more or less backward.” [8] As a professor at the University of Toronto himself, Chamberlin is quick to acknowledge the “admirable contributions” of his faculty forebears, but is equally adamant in his disregard for the binary model:

Speech and writing are so entangled with each other in our various forms and performance of language that we are like Penelope, weaving them together during the day and unweaving them at night. Our current theories and models illustrate none of this, with the result that studying oral and written traditions using existing paradigms is an exercise in pushing a string or herding cats. [9]

Chamberlin’s comparison of modern Western academia to the world of Homer’s Penelope drives home his point that there is just as much similarity as there is difference between pre- and post- literate conceptions of orality. While Ong’s assertion that “primary orality, literacy, and secondary orality are interacting vigorously with one another in confusing complex patterns” [10] seems not so far from Chamberlin’s vision, his characterization of orality as “redundant” and “situational” reveals his ultimate reversion to a binary perspective.

Part of the impetus to rethink the literacy/orality model is that the technological advances of recent years – particularly in the realm of cyberspace – have created a world where the distinction between the two media becomes blurred. If orality, as Ong suggests, is “evanescent,” [11] how do we categorize audio-recordings or sound-files that we exchange, disperse, and most importantly, re-play? If the text, contrastingly, is thought of as durable or permanent, then what do we make of the instant message that gets instantaneously deleted? The hierarchical notion of “secondary orality,” here, seems unable to keep up with the ongoing cyber-revolution that was, in Ong’s era, in its earliest phase; in a world of e-mail communication, music downloading, and MOO chat rooms, the question is not of whether, but rather of how the oral and textual are integrated. Just as Ong’s rigid categorizations do not adequately reflect the multi-sensory character of the cyber-world, McLuhan’s notion of the “reversal” [12] that comes with new technology returns to a dualism that is too limited in scope: the computer does not initiate the dominance of one media form over another, but rather encourages their fusion within the pluralistic realm of the “global village.”

Thus, we are like Penelope, not only in our weaving, but also in our immersion in a multi-media world. As Jay David Bolter observes, the ever-shifting nature of modern hyper-text is not unlike that of the fluid mutability of the Homeric oral performance. [13] R.A. Lanham, similarly, points to “the computer’s oscillation between reader and writer,” which “reintroduces the oscillation between literate and oral coordinates that stands at the center of classical Western literature.” [14] While the Toronto School (as well as post-structuralist theorists like Derrida and Levinas) did much, during the 20th century, to assert the primacy of the written word, the advent of contemporary internet culture has encouraged the recognition that oral and textual need not be viewed from a hierarchical perspective.

If speech, in McLuhan’s terms, is an “extension” of man, [15] then orality, according to Henri Meschonnic, provides a more direct access to the speaking subject:

Orality is the manifestation of a gestural mode, of a corporeality and a subjectivity within language. With the means of the spoken within the spoken. With the means of the written within the written. [16]

Following Meschonnic, orality is not the external and impersonal sound produced by the voice, but rather a means through which an interior drive toward communication is accessed: as Donald Wesling and Teudeusz Slawek add, “orality is not what is spoken, but what allows one to speak.” [17] While Meschonnic’s anthropological definition adds additional complexity to the already difficult issue of terminology, his effort to separate speech from orality (and exteriority from interiority) provides a more attractive alternative to the McLuhan binary: that orality is not the opposition of writing, but rather a catalyst of communication more generally, which is part of both writing and speech.

With the Meschonnic distinction in mind, it is useful to recall that particularly in its aesthetic function, orality is often considered a means of accessing collective memory or innate human truth. Whether orality manifests itself through an epic, a folktale, a lyric, a lament, a dirge, or a charm, the medium is innately connected with cultural knowledge. The griot, or African praise-poet, is at once poet, prophet and historian – seer of past, present, and future, and keeper of truth. The North American slam poet, similarly, gives voice to the collective hardships of American life, while the Caribbean dub poet reflects on questions of political and social justice. While Western egocentrism encourages the notion of orality as a secondary (and inferior) aesthetic medium, it is important to recall that in many cultures, orality is the dominant art form. Edouard Glissant, for example, has observed that in Haiti, orality is such an integral part of artistic culture that the word “literature” has been replaced by “oraliture,” which connotes both the written and verbal arts. [18]

This is not to suggest, of course, that we relegate orality to a culturally-specific or regionalized realm. It is worth remembering that to this day, the majority of the world’s inhabitants use orality as their primary communicative medium, and the “global village” of modern media is in fact not as “global” as the lens of Occidentalism might lead us to believe. The study of orality, then, must recognize all of the medium’s diverse functions; while the Western conception is primarily aesthetic, it is important to recall that the medium also serves the practical purpose of knowledge-exchange and transmission within a community. Regardless of what role it plays, one cannot dispute the centrality of orality as a means of human communication, and for all objections to his theory, one must acknowledge the truth in Ong’s assertion that orality holds a place “close to the human life world.” [19]

Courtney MacNeil

Winter 2007

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. “A New History of Reading: Hunting, Tracking, and Reading.” For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite. Ed. Timothy J. Reiss, 145-164. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2001.

Foley, John Miles. How to Read an Oral Poem. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Lanham, R. A. Literacy and the Survival of Humanism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

"Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan." Playboy, March 1969. Online. http://home.ix.netcom.com/ ~mmfamily/McLuhan%20 Playboy.html/.

Praeger, Michele. “Edouard Glissant: Toward a Literature of Orality.” Callaloo 15.1 (1992): 41-48.

Ong, Walter J. “Literacy and Orality in Our Times." ADE Bulletin 58 (1979): 1-7.

-- . Orality and Literacy. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1982.

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 15 Feb. 2007.

Wesling, Donald and Tadeusz Slawek. Literary Voice: The Calling of Jonah. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Notes

1. “orality, n. 1.1," The Oxford English Dictionary.

2. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 15.

3. "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan," 26.

4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 79.

5. John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, 26.

6. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 6.

7. Ibid., 11.

8. J. Edward Chamberlin, “A New History of Reading: Hunting, Tracking, and Reading," 151.

9. Ibid.

10. Ong, “Literacy and Orality in Our Times,” 3.

11. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 36.

12. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 262.

13. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, 191.

14. Lanham, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism, 106.

15. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 79.

16. Qtd. in Donald Wesling and Tadeusz Slawek, Literary Voice: The Calling of Jonah, 159.

17. Ibid.

18. Michele Praeger, “Edouard Glissant: Toward a Literature of Orality," 45.

19. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 42.