Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0415138051
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Gunther Kress argues for a radical reappraisal of the phenomenon of literacy, and hence for a profound shift in educational practice. Through close attention to the variety of objects which children constantly produce (drawings, cuttings-out, 'writings' and collages), Kress suggests a set of principles which reveal the underlying coherence of children's actions; actions which allow us to connect them with attempts to make meaning before they acquire language and writing.
This book provides fundamental challenges to commonly held assumptions about both language and literacy, thought and action. It places these challenges within the context of speculation about the abilities and dispositions essential for children as young adults, and calls for the radical decentring of language in educational theory and practice.
with units all of one kind, of one size, at one level alone (that is, with letters, or with words, or with sentences, or with ‘stories’). The other is the assumption that reading is bounded by the prior decisions of the maker of the initial sign—whether the novelist, the sub-editor in charge of the layout of a newspaper page, or whoever. Reading is the action of a reader: the actions of writers in their prior writing are significant but not decisive. WHAT IS READING? SOME PRINCIPLES Figure 3.1
pronouncements of politicians, and certain other ‘opinion-makers’. For instance, a call for the return to the moral and cultural certainties of a bygone age may stand as one example, as does a call for the forms and contents of teaching to be designed for the needs of an economy which no longer exists. The first and real question for education, and for schools, concerns human dispositions: what are the qualities, habits, skills, attitudes, naturalized and habituated practices which will be
approach that I have tried to outline here, my explanation of this MAKING SENSE OF THE WORLD 59 child’s reading is something like this. He hears a story, from a still strange culture, in spoken language. He makes sense of it in terms of the resources available to him, which are at this stage still largely those of the Nigerian culture from which he comes, and in which he lived the first seven years of his life. Those resources include narratives and images, practices and experiences of a
that, there is the question of affect generally. The affective state of a child coming from her or his home to school in the morning will influence how that child will and can respond to an explanation, a task, given or set by the teacher. Affect ‘colours’ all activity, and cognitive action in particular. Again this is simply restating, in some ways, what is commonsensical: a warm, supportive, encouraging atmosphere in the classroom has positive effects on the ability of children to learn; and
active96; adult’s41; in alphabetic cultures54; boundaries of42, 45, 53, 98, 111; children’s interest in46; child’s41, 42, 46; and culture53, 54; etymology of58; evidence for44, 45; and genre55; in logographic cultures54; principles of42, 72; processes of42, 44, 59; resistant98; as sign-making42, 44, 53; transformative action53, 59, 61, 97; of two-dimensional objects52 reading-riddle59 reading theory46 realism, kinds of25, 26, 84 Reid, Euanxviii representation9, 10, 13, 14, 23, 26, 52, 68, 81,