Abstract
The chapter addresses the topic of developing literacy from the perspective of “later language development”, focusing on linguistic literacy. Attitudes to written language as a key component of linguistic literacy are reviewed across different periods in history and from the perspective of different disciplines. Lexical, syntactic, and discursive features of text construction are then analyzed as relatively more or less impacted by whether the medium of expression is speech or writing. The data-base consists of 160 personal-experience narratives produced by the same participants in both speech and writing, half in Californian English, half in Israeli Hebrew, from four age/schooling levels (middle childhood, pre-adolescence, adolescence, and educated adults). The chapter concludes by considering what changes in developing linguistic literacy from grade-school to middle- and high-school as manifested in writing/speech distinctiveness. Modality-driven differences between the two means of expression are evident from the youngest age-group: Written texts show greater density in packaging of information, while their spoken counterparts are longer and include more repetitions, and disfluencies. That is, processing factors inherent in the output demands of each modality tend to apply irrespective of age. On the other hand, speech/writing distinctiveness manifests a somewhat U-shaped developmental curve: In 4th and 7th grade, written expression is still largely anchored in the more familiar medium of spoken language; later, from high-school on, increasing differentiation between writing and speech reflects the two modes of expression as distinct styles of discourse; at a third phase of knowledge integration, literate adults manifest bi-directional effects between the two modes of expression, such that their spoken language demonstrates the impact of familiarity with written discourse.
Parts of this chapter are revised and rewritten from a paper in Hebrew to appear in the Israel Journal of Literacy and Language. Thanks to Enav Kedar for help with style and editing.
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Notes
- 1.
Concern here is with between-genre distinctions, so disregarding for present purposes related notions of different text-internal rhetorical functions (Giora 1990; Paltridge 2002) or “modes of discourse” (Du Bois 1980; Smith 2003) such as argumentation, classification, definition, description, or evaluation.
- 2.
Dr. Bracha Nir was actively involved in developing all the relevant measures, as well as being responsible for statistical analyses, details of which are provided in a chapter written in Hebrew (Berman and Nir 2011). Graphs for each finding noted here can be supplied by the author on request.
- 3.
The English-language texts were elicited in San Diego, California, under the supervision of Judy S. Reilly, and Hebrew data-collection was conducted in Israel by the author and her associates.
- 4.
This trend is no doubt intensified by the particular sub-genre of narrative, a personal-experience account of a situation in which the narrators themselves were directly involved, but the subjective discourse stance provoked by this communicative context applies similarly in the written medium.
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Berman, R.A. (2016). Linguistic Literacy and Later Language Development. In: Perera, J., Aparici, M., Rosado, E., Salas, N. (eds) Written and Spoken Language Development across the Lifespan. Literacy Studies, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21136-7_12
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