[PEN-L:30699] Re: War Against Literacy=$$$$

[Charles Jannuzi <b_rieux@xxxxxxxxx>]

I sort of wrote this up while engaged in
pro-Whole Language debate in support of people
like Krashen and Goodman (true heroes for
language and literacy education in the US).

It has since grown into a presentation at the
World Congress for Applied Linguistics in
Singapore this December (my other presentation is
about articulatory phonology so believe me this
one is better here).

I'll pretend you just woke up at the very end of
my allotted 20 minutes in time for the rousing
conclusion. Notice how all jargon is carefully
explained in context:

 Why phonological reading skills are top-down
subcomponents of whole language
Charles Jannuzi, Fukui University, Japan

Conclusion

In the cases of ESL/EFL learning and ESL/EFL
literacy, it could be argued that we need to
think more along the terms in which Goodman
(1967,1993) originally expressed and later
clarified his view of reading as a
"psycholinguistic guessing game": that is, ALL
language processing and comprehension comes
together with mentally internalized linguistic
knowledge and non-linguistic background knowledge
as a TOP-DOWN, wholistic orchestration of many
skills, including those that have been
traditionally thought of as bottom-up and
text-driven. There is no one aspect of a written
text that is self-sufficiently bottom-up without
top-down cognition. Active human minds and brains
have to be engaged in language learning and text
comprehension, or no meaning can be understood,
interpreted, revised, created or exchanged.

Given the complex, irregular, incomplete, partly
logographic (like Chinese characters, read as
whole words), partly phonological nature of
English writing conventions and the reading
processes this requires, even phonological
(sublexical) manipulation of text and phonics
skills must be more top-down, mind-driven
processes than text-driven artifacts and
bottom-up rule inputs. Texts and external rules
do not drive comprehension processes and never
will. It is precisely  because written English is
both alphabetic while so phonologically
incomplete and inconsistent that, if it is
visually and linguistically processed at
sub-lexical levels, it truly is the
"psycholinguistic guessing game" that Goodman has
called it (see Figure 1--sorry no attachments for
a list like this; I'll have it up online soon).
All parts of ESL/EFL reading, then, from
grapho-phonological elements to lexical,
syntactical, discoursal and schematic ones too,
if they contribute to language access and
meaningful engagement of text, are best thought
of as top-down in nature. And, in the areas that
have been traditionally thought of as the
linguistic, text-driven bottom-up levels, it is
the phonological and lexical elements that may
prove most linguistically reinforcing and
illuminating. Thus, it is important for teachers
to revise and implement more complete concepts of
phonology in teaching a SL/FL and in teaching how
to read it. As whole language teachers we must
help students to learn to read ESL/EFL so that
they may then read to learn in English.

References

Goodman, K. (1967). Reading: A psycholinguistic
guessing game. Journal of the Reading  Specialist
5, 126-135.

Goodman, K. (1993). Phonics phacts. Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann.



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