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2.2. Language and literacy
One of the principal arenas in which the relationship between language and education is played out in the present study is that of literacy and the use of written text. The
communities under study have come to use written text in particular ways, and their choices of oral or written means of communication appear to coincide with other social choices.
Language is also an essential aspect of this picture, particularly given the historical dominance of English for written text and the recent emergence of the written mother tongue
as an alternative. Three aspects of current thinking about literacy and language are particularly relevant
to this study. One is the debate over whether a cultures characteristic uses of oral and literate means of communication are grounds for constructing a broader cognitive profile of that
culture. A second has to do with whether literacy practice is better defined in terms of its technical components or its social applications. A third is the exploration of the impact of
language medium on literacy practices. 2.2.1. Literacy and orality
Much has been made of the historical impact of literacy on individual cognition and social behaviours. Goodys 1968 notion that the historical development of a culture mirrors
a childs developmental processes led him to argue that the acquisition of literacy by a culture triggers - or at least accompanies - increased cognitive capacity. Ong 1985 later posited
numerous distinctions between oral and literate cultures, including word-orientation vs. object-orientation, redundancy vs. linearity of expression, sound-orientation vs. sight-
orientation and conservative vs. innovative patterns of thought. More recently, Olson 1996 plays down the cultural and cognitive dichotomy between oral and literate behaviours, but
nevertheless contends that writing has played a key role in the evolution of what is currently termed scientific thought by opening new ways of thinking about ones language.
Other researchers have attempted to account for the cultural characteristics that appear to accompany oral and written communication behaviours. Tannen 1985 focuses on the
degree of interpersonal involvement as a measure for differentiating between oral and written language. Chafe 1985 similarly describes the detached quality of written language
compared to the personal involvement of spoken language. Denny 1991 asserts that the essential difference between the use of oral and literate language is decontextualisation: the
disconnection of information from its context. According to these arguments, oral cultures tend to prioritise interpersonal and contextualised interaction, while literate cultures tend to
26 have more tolerance for communicative modes that feature detachment and decontextualised
thought. These arguments, though criticised today by current literacy theorists specifically
those of the New Literacy Studies school; see Gee 1996, do resonate to some extent with the observed behaviours of rural developing world cultures. However, the challenge is to
interpret those behaviours in a way that does not dismiss the communication behaviours of certain cultures as merely oral or categorise those cultures as underdeveloped based on their
particular uses of written text. There is also the danger of polarising these behaviours in such a way that communities are labelled as only oral or only literate in nature Heath 1983:230.
In fact, the New Literacy Studies NLS school of situated literacy rejects entirely the notion that literacy has any cognitive effects independent of the social context in which it is
practised. They argue that the categories of orality and literacy are insufficient to describe the social practices, values and world views which influence the use of written text Gee
1996. In refusing to recognise such categories, NLS proponents also reject the relegation of certain cultures to potentially demeaning categories of primitiveness based on the nature of
their use of written text. Still, it is difficult to deny that some individuals and cultures prioritise oral strategies
of communication over written ones. Such preferences imply choices about the influence which written text - and extra-local knowledge - are permitted to have. The social
characteristics associated with literacy could be described in terms of the extent to which a given society exploits the capacity of written text to encompass large amounts of knowledge
and distribute that knowledge among individuals who have no face-to-face contact with each other. An individual or society that chooses to utilise written text gains the capacity for extra-
local, disembodied communication, but that individual or society also opens itself to the influence of non-local ideas and values. Not every society values that capacity of written text,
or is disposed to use literacy that way. Finally, the communities under study showed that patterns of oral or literate
communication are closely related to the languages identified with those two modes of communication. As will be seen in section 5.6.1, the identification of mother tongue with oral
communication and English with written communication is highly influential in shaping peoples communication choices.
27 2.2.2. Literacy: individual skills vs. social meaning
The term literacy itself is in some ways a moving target, as its definition is always evolving Powell 1999:10. Current disagreement over the precise nature of literacy is related
to the fact that literacy involves both a psycholinguistic, technical-skills component and a sociocultural component. Understanding the role of literacy in society requires accounting for
both components, as well as the theoretical perspectives that emphasise each one. The oralliterate debate, discussed above, is one area of disagreement between the
technicalindividual perspective and the sociocultural perspective. A related debate concerns the cognitive vs. the social aspects of literacy. The psycholinguistic approach to literacy
focuses on the cognitive aspects of how an individual learns to read and write e.g. Chall 1996; Wray and Medwell 1991. Psychological and linguistic differences between oral and
writing competencies are scrutinised, as are the effects of language fluency on the ability to read. Societal influences on reading and writing are seen to be important, but primarily for
their impact on the individual. The psycholinguistic approachs focus on skill acquisition by the individual learner is
helpful in this study because it highlights the need for intentional instruction in reading. In communities such as those studied here, where the print environment is limited and children
are not exposed to much meaningful print outside of a formal instructional context, intentional reading instruction becomes particularly important. The essential tools of
decoding, soundsymbol correspondence and text comprehension skills are not normally acquired without intentional effort. Not only so, but the context in which these skills are
acquired, including the language in which this acquisition takes place, influences peoples perceptions and uses of written text. A readers ability to extract meaning from written text
depends on his or her fluency in the language of the text. This aspect of reading is highly relevant to understanding the choices people make between oral and written communication,
and to their success in gathering meaning from written text. An extension of the notion of literacy as primarily an individual, cognitive skill is
what is called the functional approach to literacy. Promoted by institutions such as UNESCO
30
, international donors and progressive-minded governments, this approach asks, What is literacy good for? and answers the question primarily in economic terms. Literacy
30
UNESCOs best-known endeavour in this area was the Experimental World Literacy Program of 1965-1975 Prah 1995. Since that time, UNESCOs discourse about literacy has turned more in the direction of social
engagement: see the current UNESCO website on literacy as freedom. Still, even this new perspective maintains a significant emphasis on the economic aspects of freedom.
28 becomes a tool for helping the individual to face the economic challenges of daily life, and as
such it becomes an aid to economic and social development and even nation building Papen 2001:45.
This functional perspective of literacy is quite prevalent in the communities under study, primarily insofar as literacy is associated with schooling. Schooled literacy, along with
other knowledge and skills acquired in school, is expected by parents and pupils to lead to the economic advancement of the individual.
In contrast to these psycholinguistic and functional views of literacy, the NLS sociocultural view sees literacy primarily as a set of social practices Barton and Hamilton
2000. One NLS theorist, Gee 1996, notes that, like the functional view, the sociocultural view also asks the question, What is literacy good for? However it answers the question in
terms of the social settings and social knowledge which provide the context for literacy use in any given instance.
Texts and the various ways of reading them do not flow full-blown out of the individual soul or biology; they are the social and historical inventions of various
groups of people. One always and only learns to interpret texts of a certain type in certain ways through having access to, and ample experience in, social settings
where texts of that type are read in those ways Gee 1996:44-45.
In its insistence that the meanings and uses of literacy are socially situated, the sociocultural view of literacy implies that, far from being a set of value-free, autonomous
skills which shape society, literacy practices are themselves shaped by social and political realities. This leads Street 1984 to argue that literacy is actually ideological, not
autonomous, in nature. The use of text, whatever its language or content, has social and ideological implications.
It is here that the political aspect of literacy emerges. An important tenet of the NLS perspective is that literacy is closely related to power distribution. Social inequalities
structure peoples participation in literacy events, as access to literacy resources is unequally distributed in society Barton and Hamilton 1998:17. This perspective on the political aspect
of literacy is shared by other advocates of social change. Paolo Freires notion of literacy-as- conscientizaçao Freire 1970 is built on a similar argument, specifically that the
sociopolitical exclusion of the poor includes their inability to generate or use written text in their own interests. ActionAids more recent Reflect approach to adult learning and social
change International Reflect Network 2001 follows a very similar argument, if slightly less politicised and controversial. These two approaches to literacy consider it as a tool for the
engagement of people in wider processes of development and sociopolitical change.
29 Along with its political implications, another key aspect of the sociocultural view of
literacy has to do with the role of written text in constructing social meaning. Kress 2000:9, also a NLS proponent, defines literacy as
the fundamental fact of meaning making: the constant transformation of resources in line with the interested action of those who use the resources to give shape to
their meanings.
For Kress, text literacy is simply one way of attaining the goal of all communicative acts, i.e. the conveyance of meaning.
However as the literacy theories of the NLS evolve, the notion that literacy may only be defined with reference to local context is being contested from within. Brandt and Clinton
2002 argue that even though literacy is ascribed certain local meanings in society, literacys presence in that society is marked by particular objects and technologies the origin of which
may not be local: letters, textbooks, advertising and so on. Thus the presence of text in a society may indicate meanings originating outside that society p.344. Literacy is still seen
as deriving its meaning from a social context, but not only from the local social context. This recognition of the capacity of literacy technologies to communicate meanings independent of
their local social uses introduces the notion of agents outside local society who are able to influence the shape and uses of literacy in a social context: literacy sponsors, as Brandt and
Clinton term them p.349. In that way, the objects and technologies through which literacy is mediated can serve as the agents of external as well as internal interests; for as Street 2003
notes, these distant literacies are also ideologically based. Thus the meanings given shape by written text in one social context may be transposed into another.
In an interesting demonstration of the evolution of their own thinking on the relation between literacy and society, Olson and Torrance 2001 - not themselves identified with the
NLS school - have distinguished between the causality of literacy what possessing literacy skills does to people and the instrumentality of literacy what people do with literacy
skills in a society. This position, along with Brandt and Clintons and Streets recent work, signals a shift of current literacy theory towards the recognition of the influences brought to
bear by local social context, the objects and technologies of literacy, and the source of those objects and technologies on the meanings and uses of written text.
This shift is important to this study because it provides a theoretical framework of literacy which recognises the key roles of individual linguistic and cognitive skills
development, and the role of written texts in various forms, and yet places the entire phenomenon of literacy in a context of social meaning and negotiation. It is essential to
30 understand that literacy practice is shaped by linguistic and reading skills and the availability
of written text, as well as by local expectations regarding text use. 2.2.3. The language of literacy
The relation of literacy to language is also crucial to this study. As has been mentioned above, fluency in the language of instruction strongly influenced the degree to
which people in this study acquired and used literacy skills. Language choice in the instructional setting was thus pivotal in determining what was learned. This was true in both
the formal and nonformal settings for learning literacy. The importance of this interplay between language and literacy is evident in the
postulated relationship of literacy to the construction of postcolonial identity
31
in Northwest Cameroon, as a former British colony whose education system is still very much modelled on
the British curriculum - and language - of colonial days. Collins and Blot 2003:122 describe the hybrid identity which has come to typify the post-colonial societies of Africa and
elsewhere, and the place of literacy in forging that identity:
From the colonial to the postcolonial world the struggle for identity is a struggle to write the lives of subject peoples, such writing being in the language of the victors
or in the language of the conquered transformed by the colonizer… The languages used and the literate means employed, the texts produced and read, tell
us much of the construction and transformation of selves through literate practices. Such selves are not formed by literacy; but the forging, both social and personal, of
a new hybrid identity occurs in the cauldron of culture clash where literacy is both weapon and shield. Literacy is neither cause nor consequence; the process of
self-fashioning is, rather, mediated by literacy emphasis in the original.
In the communities studied here, literacy acquisition is predominantly in English, as are most of the texts that are read. The forging of the hybrid identity described by Collins and
Blot is thus finding its expression in English. Yet, given the profound connection between culture and language both indigenous and European, the availability of local language
means of expressing identity through literate practices ought to enhance formation of a more locally situated identity. The creation of written text in local languages is advocated by Ngugi
wa Thiongo 1986:28; he argues that the use of colonial languages in African education and literature has heightened personal and social alienation among the educated African
population, and he advocates a renaissance of African-language literature to help restore
31
In a much stronger view of the relation of language to postcolonial experience, Robinson 1997:24 argues that cultural experience is born out of the intersections of language, place and self; postcolonial experience is
born out of disruptions or destabilisations of those intersections. For Robinson, the very need to form a postcolonial identity implies serious damage having been done to the indigenous culture.
31 wholeness to the African identity.
32
The Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures 2000 further affirms the importance of using African languages to express
African identity. Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester 2000 also address the issue of language and literacy,
but from a more empirical perspective. Their model of biliteracy maps the complex relationships between bilingualism and literacy as a series of continua, focusing particularly
on the power relations that characterise the interaction between language and literacy. The model demonstrates the ways in which less powerful expressions of literacy e.g. local,
minority-language, vernacular, contextualised are less privileged than the more powerful ones e.g. official language, non-local, decontextualised. Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester
argue for the need to contest this power weighting in the institutions and structures that deliver literacy.
This focus on language and literacy is relevant here because the present study is concerned with the contexts and materials which facilitate local-language literacy practices,
upon which the potential for identity formation as described above rests. It is also concerned with the ways in which mother-tongue literacy is situated in the landscape of
literacy learning and literacy practices, and whether the efforts being made to promote mother-tongue literacy are causing any discernible change in literacy practices.
2.2.4. Summary: Language and literacy This discussion of language and literacy highlights the complexity of written text use
in the minority-language communities under study. Their uses of written text reflect their own values for literacy as well as their proficiency in reading skills and in the language of
literacy. In this environment, the new alternatives for literacy practice made available by the emergence of mother-tongue literacy highlight these questions of language fluency, social
uses of literacy and the interests served by current literacy practices.
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The question may be asked whether English should still be considered a colonial language in anglophone Africa today, given its widespread use as an official language in African nations over the last four decades of
independence from Great Britain. The answer is yes: not for the association of English with a specific former colonial power, but for the more global-level, Northern-based cultural and political power it embodies. It is true
that African dialects of English and English-based pidgins have developed over the years; however, the language that Cameroonian schoolchildren call grammar English is still perceived as a foreign language in
rural and semi-rural Cameroon, and represents the powerful, prestigious knowledge practices and values of the North. Acquisition of this language continues to be a challenge for semi-rural and rural Cameroonians, and
English fluency serves a gatekeeping function for social, educational and employment opportunities.
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2.3. Language and education
Kategori