This course introduces innovative approaches to learning and teaching, with a focus on the use of e-learning and social web technologies.
10.1 The Nature of Writing
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Из курса от партнера University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Multimodal Literacies: Communication and Learning in the Era of Digital Media
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Module 2: Making Meaning by Reading + Making Meaning by Writing + Making Visual Meaning
This module begins with an overview of the conventional focus of literacy pedagogy – reading and writing. In its second half, the module applies a parallel set of tools to analysis of visual meanings.
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Dr William CopeProfessor
Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, College of Education
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
College of Education
So this series of videos is about writing, the nature of writing.
And at first glance, or on the first hearing, I should say,
writing seems to be simply a process of transcribing speech.
We've got a word, cat.
And we've got sounds, phonics, actor and,
therefore, you write it down into transcription of speech.
Now, in fact, writing is deceptively complex and
it's deceptively different from speech.
And what I'm really going to be talking about in this series of videos
is just the ways in which it's different.
>> I now turn to making meaning by writing.
Here, also, there are many theories and debates.
But, basically, we can say writing is a transcription of language,
that is, a rendering of thinking into symbolic systems and onto a surface.
Traditional grammar represents writing in the following basic ways.
Firstly, it deals with morphemes.
These are the smallest grammatical units of a language like the prefix, the stem,
the suffix, the number, the tense, mood, voice.
It also likes to name parts of speech as nouns,
pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions.
And, of course, syntax, how these come together in phrases, clauses,
sentences and agreement.
These elements of writing are just meaning by the way that they are chosen and
the way that they are combined.
It sounds simple, but it's not.
There are lots of complication, rules and
exceptions involved that we will examine together in this unit.
>> Here are a set of contrasts, now, between speaking and writing.
So speaking is you and I are together.
I'm here, you're there, and we're here simultaneously in the same space.
Writing is something about communicating at a distance.
So I write something down, it's not in the same time that it gets read.
In fact, when it's read might be an arbitrarily different time, it doesn't
have to be simultaneous, and there's nothing particular about when it might be.
And it's at a distance, often.
You might be in the same space, but whether you're in the same space or
not is actually immaterial.
And writing is designed to be writing at a distance,
the person communicating is no longer there.
So this might seem to be trivial and obvious, but
actually has a whole lot of interesting and important implications.
Firstly, speaking is very much a creature of time,
we're in the same time together, whereas writing is very much a creature of space.
And the structure of speaking and
the structure of writing are actually quite different.
So I'm now doing a funny thing, which is really, it's kind of, it's speaking.
But it's kind of a little bit like writing because I've done so
much writing in my life that I often speak like somebody who's writing.
But if I was just having a conversation with you now, perhaps telling you a story,
or telling you what I did yesterday,
it would be simply a series of clauses, and each clause is pretty uniform.
They're probably about the same size, and it's a string of clauses,
one clause after another.
And there are none of the artifacts that appear in writing, like a sentence.
A sentence doesn't appear in speaking,
or beyond that, paragraphs or sections.
So what we have in clauses is a relatively flat, continuous structure of
units which are very similar, following each other, one after the other in time.
Whereas what we have is, in writing,
we have this hierarchical structure of phrases, clauses, sentences,
paragraphs, sections, which actually are laid out in space.
So there's another set of important differences.
But the other thing about about speaking is that it's repetitive and redundant.
So if you were to record a conversation between two people, they might say
the same phrase a couple of different ways, they might repeat themselves.
It's repetitive, it's redundant, it's circuitous, it's round about,
and, I think of something else that I referred to a minute ago and
I elaborate on that and then I jump forward.
But what happens is that my thinking happens sequentially.
Once something has been said, it's been said forever, and
if I need to elaborate on it, I need to say it again.
Whereas what we do with writing is actually very concise.
It's about you don't want to use the same word
twice in consecutive sentences because it doesn't sound good.
If it's said once, it doesn't need to be said again.
So it actual highly structured and dense in a way that speaking is kind of,
if you like, rambling, repetitive and redundant.
Also, the strategies for them with errors are very, very different.
If I'm talking to you now and I stumble over a word, I might say something which
is a bit ungrammatical, I might correct myself because it doesn't sound right,
I might say something which I wasn't very clear about, and
I really want you to understand clearly, so I sort of rephrase it.
I repeat it, I say it another way, I say it a different way,
I'm not sure that you understood it so I say it again.
And so what we're all the term doing in speaking is we're doing corrections,
we're hearing ourselves speak, we're seeing the response of the other person
and wondering whether they understood it.
So we do a lot of error correction, and all the errors corrected are audible.
If you like, they're very, very tangible, visible, knowable,
seeable because it's while we're speaking.
Whereas what we do in writing is we actually make the errors invisible.
We run a spell checker afterwards to fix the spelling,
we notice a word that's been repeated, we go back and proof what we've done.
And we've always done that with writing, by the way.
The way we did it with handwriting was sometimes we wrote a first draft,
then we wrote a neater draft after that, or we do crossings out, or whatever.
But in a way, with digital text, the corrections becomes even less visible,
so there might be suggested texts where you spell something some way and
the suggested text tells you how to spell it the correct way or a different way.
But also what we do with a keyboard is a lot of repetitive stuff.
Where we're all the time looking back over at what we've done, going back over it,
this kind of a cycle of moving a bit forward, looking back a sentence,
moving a bit forward, looking back a sentence.
And we actually do a lot of correction, particularly in these digital spaces
which, for the purpose of making our corrections invisible, not to be seen.
So the correction strategies are very, very different.
The actual processes of fabrication are very, very different.
But the next thing about this contrast between speaking and
writing is speaking is relentlessly linear.
Remember, it happens in time.
I can't go back and correct something I said three or four sentences ago.
The only way I can deal with that is to restate it, or reframe it, or
make a correction or something now.
It's linear because it's absolutely wedded to time, something that was said five
seconds ago is gone forever because those seconds can't be recreated, and
I have to repeat those seconds in the future if I want to recreate them.
Whereas the process of writing is multilinear so, in other words,
I'm looking back at the text up there, I'm looking at the structure there,
I'm thinking where I might go here.
So my thinking processes around the text are not
just the linearity of time, but they are the multilinearity of
space because I'm framing this thing on a screen or on a page, and so on.
And one final thing about the differences between speaking and writing.
In our theory of multimodality, which we've been
outlining through these videos, this course, this book,
that one of the interesting things is what each mode is aligned to.
And speaking is very much alive with gesture.
Here I am doing all this kind of stuff.
If you like, I'm the conductor of my own speech,
it's like an orchestra where I'm doing this as I speak.
And goodness knows, I tell you what, I don't know what this and this and
this means.
I'm doing all these things, and they do mean something,
and I'm barely conscious of it.
So, in other words, speaking and gesture are really closely aligned.
Whereas, in a way, writing is very closely aligned with image.
The words are images, themselves, but
we also often put images in text in a multimodal world.
So I can't put images in my speaking.
Well, in fact, I can because it's called video.
But, in fact, when I'm speaking in normal speech, I can't put images in there.
And, likewise, when I'm building a written text, gesture has gone, right?
I've got images in there, I'm communicating,
unless it's a video, gesture's gone.
So what's interesting is that the kinds of other modes that speaking and
writing are naturally aligned with are quite different.
As I say, to repeat, speaking is aligned with gesture,
writing is aligned with image.
Gesture happens in time, image happens in space.
So these are actually remarkably important differences.
So here we are in literacy in schools and we think, it's about phonics,
it's about the transliteration of speech.
And if we can conquer phonics,
we're on the way to literacy because you're just writing down speech.
It's actually a lot more than that,
it's actually profoundly different in ways which are not always that obvious.
And what it involves, it involves a different kind of mental effort.
My thinking processes in speaking are actually very, very different from my
thinking and design process, if you like, in the process of writing.
So what that means, by the way, is that when children get to school,
learning to write is not just simply about learning the sounds of speech, right?
It's actually a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of representing the world,
and a whole new way of communicating in the world.
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