Orality and Literacy: A Symposium in Honor of David Olson

This week’s reading has really opened my eyes to how much has to happen for kids to write. I have never spent this much time thinking about how speaking and writing are connected. It also makes me realize how many kids don’t realize the connection either. I have been working with 4th graders a lot lately and there are quite a few who you can’t just say to them, “What you can say, you can write.” This is all in addition to the complex set of rules writers must learn which include spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, etc.

In “Oral Discourse in a World of Literacy.” Olson writes that “ones ‘writing vocabulary’ vastly exceeds one’s ‘speaking vocabulary’,” (p. 140). I would have to question this in relation to kids. It seems to me that their speaking vocabulary would be larger if not for the sheer fact that they will get stuck on spelling (aside from getting stuck on all the ‘other’ things). Later Olson goes on to say, “Learning to write is learning to compensate for what is lost in the act of simple transcription of speech,” (p. 142). I understand what he is saying, especially after reading his book (in which he repeats and repeats and repeats); however, I don’t think that this is how kids view learning to write, at least not all the time.

Commenting on the rest of the “Research in the Teaching of English” articles, I think it’s interesting how James Paul Gee points out the grammatical features of the sentence “Lung cancer death rates are clearly associated with an increase in smoking.” It’s also interesting for me to consider that I would write this statement in a very different way from how I would say it. Either way, written or spoken, my choice of words and phrasing would depend on my audience. The way the sentence is written right now sounds academic. Academic writing is kind of like a genre in of itself which sets itself apart from other genres because of word choice and phrasing. It seems that we are always making choices on how to relay information (verbally or written). The content might not change but the delivery may change depending on the context. For example, writing in this blog takes on a different form than if I were to write a paper for class or talk about the same information in class. I am also reminded of how at work I constantly make decisions about how to tell or ask someone something. I may decide to send an email, to call the person or to speak to them in person. This decision depends largely on what I need to say or ask and/or how much time it will require.

In Martin Nystrand’s article, “Rendering Messages According to the Affordances of Language in Communities of Practice,” I would like to comment on when he says, “We now know, however, that writing emerged as a mode of language completely unrelated to the need to transport speech; writing developed not to ‘preserve language across space and through time’…but rather to enable language in remote contexts of use,” (p. 161). This makes me think of the Lascaux Cave Paitings which date back to somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 B.C. Was this not writing? What was the purpose—to communicate, preserve life, create a record or to express?