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THE liberal arts curriculum in our colleges and universities has lately become the focus of an unprecedented amount of critical attention, both on campus and off. In 1985 the American Council on Education (ACE) surveyed trends in curricular reform and found that “curricular change continues to occupy center stage on the nation's campuses. More than eighty percent of responding colleges were currently reviewing the curriculum or had recently done so” (El-Khowas vi). What the ACE survey revealed, apparently, was not a trend but a stampede. A national stampede seems also to have seized book buyers, who since 1987 have pounced by the hundreds of thousands on Allan Bloom's recent volume The Closing of the American Mind . Whatever one's opinion of that controversial book, one cannot deny that it is a publishing phenomenon: a runaway best-seller on the improbable subject of the undergraduate curriculum. On 31 March 1988, the faculty of Stanford University made national news simply by voting to modify one of its courses: Western Culture was to be transformed into Cultures, Ideas and Values. So fraught with educational import did that vote seem that network television produced a solemn debate on the issue between the president of Stanford University and the United States secretary of education.
When the alteration of a single course in the curriculum of a single university can command such intense national interest and engage the partisanship of such highly placed officials, something more than curricular reform must be involved. In a well-documented article entitled “On Campus: The Battle of the Books,” James Atlas claims that specific political issues—racism, sexism, and affirmative action—have become deeply embroiled in the Stanford case (24). But in a larger sense, the Stanford case, the phenomenon of the Bloom book, and the fever of curricular reform uncovered by the American Council on Education are better understood as spectacular but inter-related symptoms of the same disorder, namely, our national anxiety about the parlous condition of our entire educational system. All through the 1980s, we have witnessed a steady stream of books, pamphlets, articles, and television documentaries arguing that our educational system is failing in its mission and requires a top-to-bottom overhaul. Everything from the collapse of our space program to the decline of our international influence is being attributed to the deficiences of our schools. What quicker or more dramatic remedy could suggest itself to politicians and reformers than to propose changes in what the schools are teaching? “Reform the curriculum” has therefore become the loudest and most insistent message that embattled educators feel they have been hearing from the public throughout the 1980s.
While it is exhilarating for educators, long accustomed to public indifference, to see education at the forefront of political debate, we need to preserve perspective and retain a firm sense of our values and purposes. It is salutary to remind ourselves, amid the turmoil, that the only truly unusual thing about the present agitation for curricular reform is that so much of the pressure is coming from outside the academy. Normally, the decisive pressure for change comes from within the profession, whose internal dynamics impel us to seek ever more effective and valid ways to educate the young. Whether because assigned textbooks have proved disappointing or because repetition has rendered them stale or because new research findings demand updated classroom materials, faculty members tend to feel privately compelled to reexamine and redesign their courses almost every year. What is true for the individual is a fortiori true for the collectivity as well, whether a department or a division or an entire college. These internal pressures—particularly the pressures exerted by new information and enlarged understanding gained from research—usually suffice to overcome our natural resistance to change and to move us willy-nilly toward curricular revision. The inevitable result is that modifying the curriculum is a permanent process at most colleges. Indeed, as far as the undergraduate curriculum is concerned, the only unshakable constant we know is change.
If it is true, as I believe, that we are continually engaged, as a matter of professional conscience, in reforming the curriculum in our discipline, then surely it behooves us not to allow ourselves to be stampeded, by the outside clamor for change, into quixotic efforts to reform the entire educational system but, rather, to see that our own house is in better educational order. The field of foreign language and literature study will contribute more to the improvement of education by attending vigorously to its pressing need for greater curricular coherence and for better integration of its educational objectives with those of other humanities disciplines. Toward the furtherance of that goal, this paper addresses our need for specific curricular change that recent research findings have made especially compelling.
The findings derive from a little known area of interdisciplinary research that has been actively pursued only in the last quarter of a century. Because it is so new and so multifaceted, this field of investigation still has no generally accepted name. For convenience I have called it the “orality-literacy question,” “orality” being the cultural condition of societies with no knowledge at all of writing and “literacy” the cultural condition of societies with a long and deep commitment to a system of writing. Research has centered mainly on discerning the differences in the language and thought processes of oral and literate cultures and on determining the consequences that ensure when an oral culture makes the shift to literacy. There are, of course, no studies of the shift back from literacy to orality, because there are no recorded instances of such a shift, even though, as Harold Innis has demonstrated, such a shift has from time to time been advocated or longed for (32, 190). The first firm conclusion, then, that may be drawn from this research is that the shift from orality to literacy appears irreversible. Since that conclusion has important implications for foreign language teachers, I return to it later.
The central research issues in this field have been pursued according to three main perspectives. The theoretical or analytical approach poses generalized questions such as, In what ways is spoken language different from written language? and How are thinking, feeling, and perceiving affected by the differences between spoken and written language? That approach is favored by specialists in linguistics, aesthetics, and philosophy of language. The second, empirical approach either studies existing societies that have no writing system or are in the process of acquiring one or observes young children in literate societies who have not yet learned to read or who are just beginning to learn. Anthropologists, sociolinguists, and specialists in developmental psychology and language acquisition tend to take the empirical approach. Finally, there is the historical perspective, which in its most actively pursued form focuses on ancient Greek civilization, because that was the first society, historically, to develop its own fully phonetic alphabet and therefore the first to undergo, within its borders, the painful transition from an oral-based culture to a culture based on writing. As you might expect, historians and literary scholars, especially classicists, have led the way in this approach.
The orality-literacy question seems to have been launched as a separate field of investigation by an extraordinary publishing coincidence some twenty-five years ago, when in an eighteen-month period four different countries brought forth half a dozen works that inadvertently touched on or consciously explored some aspect of the question. Eric Havelock, in his retrospective study The Muse Learns to Write , first pointed to the importance of the accidental confluence of these widely divergent studies (24–29). For Havelock, this confluence crystallized scholarly awareness of certain related ideas, then much “in the air,” that together constituted a promising new investigative tool for explaining previously baffling aspects of the history of human culture.
The first of the influential sextet to appear was a work by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called La pensée sauvage , in which the repertory of myths, totemic symbols, and traditional narratives of most primitive societies is shown to be organized as a series of binary oppositions, suggesting a conscious or unconscious pattern of abstract thought in the primitive mind. This pattern of thought was confirmed for Lévi-Strauss by the fact that the language of each society tended to use binary oppositions as its system of taxonomy for objects, as descriptors for character, and as a classifying principle in general for understanding the world. Lévi-Strauss concluded from these parallels between language and culture that, contrary to received opinion, primitive tribes are capable of abstract thought. What he did not recognize, perhaps because his sources were all in written form, was that the particular pattern of thought he discerned was a direct consequence of orality. The concept of orality does not appear once in La pensée sauvage.
A second publication that did not mention orality but that touched on the orality-iteracy question without knowing it was a scientific treatise by the American biologist Ernst Mayr, entitled Animal Species and Evolution . The main body of this work summarized Darwinian evolution as it applied to all animal species, including the human animal. In discussing how human beings evolved, Mayr noted that the uniquely human attribute of language serves the major function of storing and transmitting information about the species from generation to generation. Mayr then argued that the function of language, for human beings, is analogous to the function of genes, which also stores information—genetic information—and transmits the information from generation to generation. What Mayr was describing, though he would not have called it that, was of course the oral tradition, the mechanism by which the past is preserved under conditions of orality. To a biologist, it appeared, the oral tradition is simply an example of adaptive evolution in the human species.
A third publication of the same period showed no overt awareness of the concepts of orality or literacy, yet managed to illuminate a major aspect of the orality-literacy question by focusing on the consequences of Gutenberg's invention of movable type. This was the landmark study by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor of English, called The Gutenberg Galaxy . It argued that the printing press opened a new phase in our cultural evolution, different from the preceding age of script, because print had the unforeseen power to transform human consciousness, imposing on the mind of those who adopted the printed word a strictly linear way of thinking that constricted the imagination. McLuhan insisted that this new fifteenth-century technology of communication had materially altered the way human beings think and view the world, and he offered suggestive examples of the changes as they were reflected in literature. In his enthusiastic embrace of the idea that technology influences thought, McLuhan went so far as to propose that twentieth-century communications technology, especially the telephone, radio, and television, was displacing the print mentality of the previous five centuries, substituting a non-linear, acoustic mode of communication, and opening another new phase in our cultural evolution. While McLuhan's analysis of the consequences of the invention of printing offered a valuable and productive insight into the history of cultural change, his overly circumscribed perspective and negative prejudice against print led him to misdiagnose the nature of literacy as an historical phenomenon and to misread the effects of twentieth-century electronics on communication. He did not seem to recognize, for example, that radio and television are just as much products of the culture of literacy—that is, of the written word—as are books.
Early in 1963, an article appeared in a British social science journal with the deliberately pointed title “The Consequences of Literacy.” Jointly written by a prominent anthropologist, Jack Goody, and an equally prominent literary scholar, Ian Watt, the article used both empirical and historical evidence to address the orality-literacy question directly, insisting that there are valid and significant distinctions to be made between oral cultures and written cultures. Citing both the Greek example and observations of primitive tribes, they pointed out that writing records and preserves speech, thus making possible the concept of history and giving society stable knowledge of its past, in place of an orally transmitted set of myths subtly modified at each retelling. They also called attention to the political consequences of literacy, which makes permanently available a common set of laws and permits the management of a society much larger than the ancient city-state, because written communication can reach farther in both space and time than can the human voice. Although the limits of the scholarly article meant that the actual distinctions made were few and sketchy, “The Consequences of Literacy” clearly outlined a program for an orderly and thorough investigation into the ways that the invention of writing has affected human society. This seminal discussion has been cited in almost every subsequent publication on the orality-literacy question.
A second work published in 1963 dealt even more explicitly with the orality-literacy question than had the article by Goody and Watt. Written by the classical scholar Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato explored the crisis provoked in ancient Greek culture by the development of writing. From the evidence of an array of Greek texts, this study purported to show that the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were creations of a purely oral culture unaided by writing and that they mainly served a didactic function for that society. In contrast, the writings of Plato were the first products of a fully literate culture, fulfilling the same didactic purpose by using a new type of language and conceptual thinking. The study went on to argue that, in the approximately three centuries that separated Homer from Plato, Greek society was moving slowly, and against determined opposition, from a purely oral culture to a fully literate one and that the evidence for this gradual evolution is in the surviving texts of that era. Havelock's book was the fullest statement of the orality-literacy question, in terms of the Greek experience, that had yet appeared. It proved controversial, of course, for classicists were accustomed to the traditional view that all Greek classical culture is a unified literary achievement, informed throughout its history by the same lofty moral ideal. Nevertheless, Havelock's ideas were accepted widely enough that his book became a major influence toward increased recognition of the orality-literacy question as a new area of scholarly enquiry. Like Goody and Watt, Havelock had made a powerful case for the tangible and far-reaching consequences of literacy.
The sixth and last of the works that contributed to the sudden blossoming of this new field of interdisciplinary research appeared early in 1964. Unlike the others, The Bias of Communication was not new, but a timely reprint of a volume of essays that had originally been published in 1951, when there existed no audience attuned to the potential import of its ideas. Its reissue was prompted, of course, by the success of the 1962 and 1963 publications, which had brought a receptive audience into being. The author of the essays was a distinguished Canadian economist, Harold Innis, who had become interested in the dramatic changes in the means of communication and concerned about their historical impact on social, political, and economic conditions. The essays were held together by an ominous central thesis, according to which “sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances” (31). Innis's ambitious discussion tried to encompass the world history of communication, beginning with the invention of writing and including the technological improvements in writing instruments and writing surfaces and the advancing technology of modern printing. From his vantage point as an economic historian, Innis could demonstrate how each significant technological advance in communications altered existing notions about time and space and upset existing power relations among state, church, and commercial interests, thus leaving social turmoil in its wake. In 1964 it was instantly apparent to the informed that The Bias of Communication was simply an economist's view of the topic Goody and Watt's essay had explored the year before.
In the quarter century since 1963, when the orality-literacy question can be said to have entered public consciousness with the power of an idea whose time had come, the pace of research has escalated dramatically on many fronts, and new findings are accumulating rapidly. So bountiful has the harvest been that two of the most prominent contributors have recently attempted overall estimates of where this research now stands and what might lie ahead: Walter J. Ong, in Orality and Literacy , and Eric A. Havelock, who completed his last word on the subject in The Muse Learns to Write. Both scholars agree that the most tangible achievement of this period has perhaps been the working out of a more detailed account of oral culture, making it possible for the modern mind to grasp the startlingly different modes of thinking and perceiving that characterize orality, such as the tendencies to totalize rather than analyze; to use formulaic, rhythmic, and repetitive patterns of expression as an aid to memory; to perceive the concrete and to have little capacity for abstraction; and to be totally dependent on hearing and memory for communication. One significant gain from this fuller understanding of orality is that we can now more readily conceive how members of purely oral cultures might have been able to create such long, complex, and sophisticated works of art as, for example, the Iliad without being able to write.
By the same token, research has developed richly detailed knowledge about the other side of the spectrum, namely, how extensively the inventions of writing and printing have altered human habits of perception and thought, producing such characteristics of a thoroughly restructured consciousness as the tendencies to use sequential logic, to analyze, to prefer to deal in abstractions and keep the concrete and the here-and-now at a distance, to be aware of time and of the past, and to rely more on sight than on hearing. Research has also alerted us to a residual orality in modern literate culture, in such forms as our pleasure in rhymes and refrains in daily speech and our addiction to clichés and formulas of politeness, tirelessly repeated as the “glue” of everyday converse. The recent popularity of the salutation “Have a nice day!” exemplifies orality at work. The rhythmic oratory of revivalist preachers and the chant of auctioneers are other common examples of residual orality in American culture.
Certainly what has been achieved so far on the orality-literacy question is fascinating, inspiring, and in many ways liberating. Anthropologists who once described shifts in primitive perception of reality as a movement from magic to science and literary scholars who used to contrast the simplistic narrative modes of ancient bards with the more rational sophistication of modern storytellers have begun to understand how much their literate bias has prejudiced their judgments and to see, as Walter Ong notes, that these perceived differences “can be more economically and cogently explained as shifts from orality to various stages of literacy” (29). Not only are we being freed of some of our prejudices about the limited intelligence of the primitive mind, but we are making rapid strides in our understanding of the dynamism of our own ever-changing literate culture, which, because it is technology-driven, both improves and complicates our lives at every new turn. By studying the contrasts between orality and literacy, we are beginning to penetrate the vital though disconcerting truth that we are at once the eager beneficiaries and the unwitting victims of literacy. Though much has already been accomplished, what is exhilarating is the glimpse those accomplishments have given us of the enormous potential for further enlightenment about the human condition. Much still remains to be done, for, as Ong reminds us, “study of the contrast between orality and literacy is largely unfinished business” (156).
Nothing is more entrancing about the orality-literacy question than its capacity to illuminate so many widely separated disciplines. Its research findings have implications for both the physical sciences and the social sciences, for the humanities disciplines and the creative arts. However, since the orality-literacy question is, at bottom, a language question, that is, an inquiry into the consequences of the various ways human beings have developed and used language, it would be no exaggeration to suggest that, for college teachers of foreign languages and literatures, study of the orality-literacy contrast is central. The research findings have implications for every aspect of our work, including the curriculum of study we offer to our students. The impact of this field of study has already been dramatic for our colleagues in classics. They can no longer teach Homer or Plato or even Vergil in the traditional manner, and they must even reorient elementary language instruction to take account of the historical changes visible in both Greek and Latin, languages hitherto treated as “fixed” in form, since “dead” languages cannot evolve. For the modern languages, the impact has been less dramatic perhaps, but it promises to become more so as awareness grows of what the research findings imply for the teaching of language, of literature, and of culture. Students of literature, for example, must begin to recognize, as they have not yet really done, that the narrative style of the medieval epic poem is heavily influenced by orality, whereas the narrative style of the novel is almost entirely a product of a print culture. The development from epic to novel is not merely a change in taste from verse to prose, as it is usually presented, but more precisely a part of a slow, more complex shift from orality-dominated to literacy-dominated modes of literary expression. The teaching of foreign culture and civilization will also be affected, as it becomes clearer how much the communication media, including the so-called oral media like radio and television, have in fact been shaped and controlled by the dominance of the printed word in our civilization.
There is not space enough in a short paper to go into all the ramifications of what orality-literacy studies might signify, now and in the future, for our discipline. I wish to conclude my remarks by emphasizing one aspect of the orality-literacy question that has compelling and far-reaching implications for us, specifically for the way we teach language within the standard foreign language curriculum. It was noted earlier that the adoption of a system of writing by any civilization alters the consciousness and thought processes of the system's users and that those alterations are, according to all available evidence, irreversible. However nostalgic that civilization might become for the simple, communal virtues of oral culture, there can be no turning back. What that fact tells us is that we ourselves inhabit a culture and use a language in which literacy is deeply and irrevocably embedded and that our way of thinking is, whether we like it or not, the way of the literate. What it also tells us—and this is of paramount importance for teachers of modern foreign languages—is that all the languages and cultures we teach are likewise irreversibly marked by the characteristics of literacy. It follows inexorably that the way we choose to teach a language or culture ought to be based, thoughtfully, on the knowledge that the language being taught is, like the language of those being taught, essentially a literate construct. Our pedagogy should exploit to the fullest that commonality of consciousness. Specialists on language acquisition have already noted the importance of developing a literate consciousness in young children just beginning to learn to read and write. The educational theorist David R. Olson describes as follows the process that the child must develop and the teacher “try to encourage: “there is a transition from utterance [spoken words] to text [written words] both culturally and developmentally [that] can be described as one of increasing explicitness, with language increasingly able to stand as an unambiguous or autonomous representation of meaning” (258). The process recommended allows the child to interiorize language and master it well enough that the intended meaning of any utterance can be communicated without any aid from facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, eye contact, or other external device on which spoken communications often depend for their full import. In spoken discourse, words alone seldom convey the complete message. In written discourse, they must.
Something of the same sort must take place in the minds of our students when they are learning a foreign language—with this one major difference, that our students are not preliterate children making the transition from orality to literacy but are young adults who have already acquired one language to a reasonable level of literacy. It would therefore be pointless to take them from the spoken to the written language, as one must with children. It makes infinitely more sense to aquaint them, from the very beginning, with the written forms of the language—that is, the forms of the language used by the average literate native and meant to be read, forms capable of yielding their intended meaning unaided by voicing or accompanying body language. The foreign language we want our students to acquire is not a specialized dialect confined to use in casual conversation, to business or professional use, or even to student or intellectual life but, rather, the standard language employed for substantive communication by the average educated adult—in other words, the language that corresponds as closely as possible to what our students already possess in their native language. What our students need to learn, therefore, is how to “read” the foreign language, in all the complex ways that “read” can mean. They must become familiar with the essential characteristics that make the language a modern literate construct: its fundamental lexicon, its syntactical and semantic norms, and its common idiomatic, allusive, and elliptical expressions, all of which must be sufficiently mastered so that the intended meaning of any utterance, spoken or written, is unambiguously communicated.
If our appropriate goal is to teach our students the standard language and culture as it exists now, then it becomes difficult to avoid challenging current dogma in our profession, which urges us to teach the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing, in that order. Since our students need to learn to “read” the foreign language in the full sense of that word would we not be wiser to reverse the sequence of the skills, to stress reading and listening first and leave the speaking and writing to a more advanced level? Given what orality-literacy studies have shown about modern literate cultures, we have a responsibility to revise our curriculum and our pedagogy accordingly and help our students to attain linguistic and cultural literacy in the foreign language they are studying. To my mind, the effective and educationally sound path to the kind of broad literacy we want our students to acquire would be to focus, as a priority, on constant exposure to the written word, assigning as much carefully chosen reading matter as possible, beginning in the early weeks of the elementary course, and steadily increasing doses as the student progresses. The other skills, being necessary and valuable but ancillary to our main goal, would be developed as well as might be in the time that remains. Since the time at our disposal, for language teaching, is always insufficient, we have always been obliged to make choices. In the light of current research, our chosen emphasis on speaking should be replaced by a new emphasis on reading, broadly defined. Only in that way can we hope to get our students to “know the language” in any meaningful sense and in any retainable form.
The author is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. This article is based on a paper presented at the ADFL Seminar East, 2–4 June 1988, in Newton, Massachusetts.
Atlas, James. “On Campus: The Battle of the Books.” New York Times Magazine 5 June 1988; 24+.
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind . New York: Simon, 1987.
El-Khowas, Elaine. Campus Trends 1985 . Higher Education Panel Reprints 71. Washington: American Council on Education, Feb. 1986.
Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. “The Consequences of Literacy.” 1968. Literacy in Traditional Societies . Ed. Jack Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.27–68.
Havelock, E. A. The Muse Learns to Write . New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.
———. Preface to Plato . Cambridge: Harvard UP 1963. Innis, Harold A. The Bias of Communication . 1951. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. La pensée sauvage . Paris: Plon, 1961. Mayr, Ernst. Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1963.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962.
Olson, David R. “From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing.” Harvard Educational Review 47.3 (1977): 257–68.
Ong, Walter]. Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
© 1989 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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