Reading and writing in English Chapter 2

The focus of this section is how people communicate through writing and reading.

We draw attention to the literary practices, how people interact with various texts (written, printed and digital), their ability to read and write and how it is used to establish connection b/w an individual use of written lang and his/her social identity (Brian Street,1984)

Several influential approaches to the analysis of texts: Written language in terms of signs, ie, words

associated with particular concepts - semiotics (Saussure, 1916)

He argues that signs are only meaningful because they belong to accepted sign systems.

Understanding texts requires us to know the purpose for which it is used, the genre, conventional type of any text we analyze.

Meaning of a text is communicated through diff ways, so writing needs to be considered in multimodal terms with attention to ‘visual’ as well as ‘linguistic’ aspects.

Reading Signs and images The basic element of a text is its letters. For

Saussure, an alphabet can be understood as a sign system in which letters play the role of signs.

Each letter has particular visual characteristics and is associated with particular sounds.

Letters can be combined to convey more complex meanings eg, AILNP (Lapin, Plain)

Other languages use diff sign systems (Polish letter N is diff from English Letter N)

Saussure’s key insight is that signs are only meaningful insofar as they exist in opposition to other signs: he suggested that it doesn’t matter exactly what a letter looks like in your handwriting, provided that it won’t get confused with other letters in the same alphabet.\

It means outside a sign system, signs lose their meaning.

Saussure regarded the vocabulary of a language as a sign system functioning in the same basic way. But many linguists reject this view at present(Harris, 1981).

Living languages accept new words all the time, both in the form of coinages (newly invented words) and in the form of borrowings (words originating in other languages).

Semiotic theory suggests that, in in order to enter a new language, an existing word must change in some way, becomes a new sign in a new sign system-an actual case of borrowing. (‘Lapin’ in French = ‘rabbit’, in English Lapin= fur of rabbit)

When we analyse a text, it is helpful to think about how its overall meaning would be changed if diff words had been used.

Sometimes, the change can be very subtle. Switching ‘rabbit’ for ‘lapin’ would produce a very obvious change to a sentence (here, a type of animal and an animal product).

Switching ‘rabbit’ for ‘bunny’, on the other hand, would produce a less obvious change, since both words signify the same concept(synonyms).

The change here is not at the level of denotation (the concept associated with the word), but at the level of connotation (what the word suggests or implies). Connotation was established as a key area of semiotic theory (Barthes, 1967)

(A 2.1) Goodnight, sweet ladies, Ah ladies, goodnight (Lou Reed)

In terms of denotation, ‘ladies’ signify several concepts: it is polyvalent (having different functions or forms). It can denote females of aristocratic rank. It can denote ‘women’, while holding very different connotations. So we might want to interpret Reed’s lyrics as patronising, and also interpret them as ironic.

Semiotic analysis can be extended to a huge range of other cultural products, including photographs and food.

Some scholars propose that ‘visual images’ can be parsed like sentences with picture elements such as lines and colours being treated analogously to parts of speech.

Whereas others deny that classifying images will uncover their meanings and the idea of visual language is no more than ‘a loose analogy at best’ (Raney, 1999).

A fundamental question is how signs are being used by human beings in specific situations?

Bourdieu (1992) complains that the influence of Saussure has left us ‘looking within the words for the power of words’ when that power is to be found elsewhere in the social ad institutional contexts within which language is used.

One of the most important non-linguistic communicators of meaning is typography.

A font is a complete set of letters, numerals and punctuation marks in a single size, while a typeface is a design for a complete set of fonts. In recent years, the two words have come to be treated as synonyms.

A typeface can be used to associate a text with previous uses made of the same/similar typefaces, and in advertising and in politics this is used to index particular identities for people and products.

If the choice of typeface is so distracting, that is because it is so meaningful.

A text needs a typeface if it is to be printed on paper or printed to a computer screen, and a typeface always says something about the text it makes visible.

Linguistic codes include punctuation marks and the letters of the alphabet, while bibliographic codes cover the visual and material characteristics of a printed text.

The relationship between these two is much easier to understand in this technological era.

The very first typefaces used in Europe were the black-letters created by Gutenberg, his famous work is a Latin Bible. (A 2.3)

Food for thought Many Corporates use specific typefaces that are

associated with their official brand. For example, the BBC has for years made very extensive use of a typeface called Gill Sans. Why do you think this might be?

Think of two different kinds of printed text, for example a newspaper and a glossy magazine, or a poster and a t-shirt. What distinguishes them in terms of bibliographic codes ( size, typography, type of paper or other material)? Who uses them, and how? (e.g. Who would wear the t-shirt, and in what circumstances? Who would display the poster, and where?)

Genre It is the French word for type or kind and is

often used to refer to specific literary forms, esp the classical genres of tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric and satire.

Bakhtin (1979) used the term ‘speech genres’ to describe the relatively stable types of spoken utterance or written text.

Carolyn Miller (1984) builds on speech act theory to argue that each genre is a social action that one carries out through writing, eg. Writing a text of book review

Sociolinguists define genres according to their function, formal characteristics or rhetorical purposes. On this definition, tragedies are a genre and so are sermons

An important difference between blogs and diaries is that the former can be accessed by virtually unlimited number of people unknown to the author whereas the latter can incorporate technical features specific to the internet. (A2.4)

Miller and Shepherd (2004) point out that the social action of blogging is performed in response to a growing demand for the public cultivation of the individual self: a demand that is not technological but cultural.

By contrast, the diary entry is much less conversational in tone.

(A 2.5)

Food for Thought More and more people write online for

purposes of work, study or leisure. This includes, for example, posting a status update on a social networking site such as FB.

If you have done this, ask yourself how conscious you were of people who read and commented on your writing, and to what extent your writing was influenced by other people’s use of the same medium?

We need to look beyond text to understand communication. Take a letter of recommendation. Such a letter’s effectiveness as an action will often depend less on how it is written than from whom it is from. (A 2.6)

Writing and reading cannot be understood in isolation from the world in which they are carried out.

Your literacy practices are not only associated with studying, they are also closely tied to your work and social life. (A 2.7)

Many people find reading to be a useful way of managing the boredom of waiting. The language of the text being read is also highly significant.

English is a language associated with the middle and upper classes in India, so in some contexts, reading text in English can help to index the reader as a person with aspiration. It is a very important language for the Indian higher education system, so reading texts of almost any kind in English can suggest an educated identity for the reader.

Diaries, blogs and lecture notes can all be considered examples of ordinary everyday writing and of what Barton and Hamilton call vernacular literacy practices (A 2.8)

Can you remember times when you have had to acquire new literacy practices (e.g. starting college, getting a new job, using an unfamiliar piece of technology)?

How is the use of postcards different now to what it was in Edwardian times? What factors have influenced these changes?

Do we now have alternative practices that have taken over some of the functions of Edwardian postcard-writing?

Literacy practices vary considerably between groups of people and between different cultures, and so may the multimodal characteristics of the texts taken up in those literacy practices.

This is because visual representations have genres, and those genres are social actions that have undergone a history of development in order to serve recurrent needs in a conventional way.

A simple illustration of this is the genre of the cartoon strip, which combines image and text. (A 2.9)

It should be clear by now that making sense of a text involves recognising the complex interactions of both visual elements and verbal elements, and relating these to contextual knowledge.

What we understand depends not only upon the image itself, but also on the context and on the other images or words on the page.

English users today are likely to scan certain kinds of image from left to right, in the same way that they scan lines of English text from left to right. On the other hand, they also show that images produced in 18th century Britain may not have been scanned the same way.

Do you think that there is a necessary connection between the way we look at texts and the way we look at images- or is it just a coincidence?

To conclude, The notion of language alone is meaningful only on a theoretical level, because real-world uses of language are invariably structured by one or more genres, realised through particular media and accompanied by forms of paralanguage

To understand communication in English, we must study a lot besides the English language.

Whatever kind of writing you are doing, you will be consciously or unconsciously writing within the conventions of that particular genre.

This would be true, for example, of a teacher writing school reports, or of a parent writing a note to the teacher about a child’s absence from school.

What you write and read, and the way you write and read, will always be influenced by who you are and the social roles that you perform in your social and cultural environment.

Dr. Shaju Nalkara Ouseph E-mail: snalkara@arabou.edu.sa