As some of you may know, the book that I had ordered to read
for this assignment never found me in China. I am really disappointed because I
was really excited to read it. It seemed so interesting. I had chosen Proust
and the Squid, which discusses the science behind reading, and how our brains
have changed over time to adjust to this newfound “necessity.”
Instead, I have been asked to substitute the book with a few
scholarly articles that discuss the topic of our class. In the spirit of my
disappointment, the first article I have chosen is one written by the author of the book I wanted to read. So I hereby present:
How the Origins of Written Language Instruct Us to Teach: A
Response to Steven Strauss
By Maryanne Wolf and
Rebecca Kennedy
Steven Strauss wrote an article in the Educational Researcher that talked about the origins of human
written and spoken language. He used several of his claims and research as
foundations for his argument that a certain method of teaching reading in
schools was the best possible method.
I do not think Ms. Wolf was too impressed.
She immediately states that, while several of his arguments
receive her “approbation,” there are three claims that need clarification
(which I read as “refutation”). These
three arguments are the origins of the alphabet, the “flimsy” nature of the
alphabet, and the way these two claims interact with each other in order to
teach reading in the classroom.
Before Wolf actually begins countering Strauss, she extends short
congratulations to him for his actions—that someone finally wrote an essay
about the history of our languages and the implications they hold for teaching
them to others. Indeed, she says, “Even if we must disagree on content, we are
grateful for Dr. Strauss for initiating such an enterprise.”
I think that was a way to soften the blow of what was to
come next.
The first thing that Wolf does is refute Strauss’ claims
that the alphabetic system is “flimsy”; that is, that because there are so many
different spellings for words that sound alike, and so many “silent” letters in
various words, English is a difficult language to make sense of. Instead of the
“logographic” system that our ancestors used, we have developed a set of
arbitrary markings to convey meaning. We do not use a picture of a bird to
convey the oral word “bird.”
Wolf contests this argument by saying that English is an
optimal language for gaining a deeper understanding of the words than what they
simply represent. She uses the word “muscle” as an example.
The silent c in muscle can be confusing for some, and can
even be considered a waste of time. How then, would that change the work “muscular”?
What would we say instead? Furthermore, she goes on to say that the silent c is
a remnant of the Latin roots from which the English word has sprouted. Knowing this can help readers identify other
words in the same family as well as understand that English isn’t simply based
on phonemic identities, but is rather a morphophonemic language—one that
changes and evolves.
At this point, I would like to talk about where I stand
here.
Living in China, I have done a tad bit of studying Chinese.
Not much, but some. My Chinese is actually pretty miserable. But I know enough
to know that Mandarin Chinese characters were originally logographic—pictures of
what the word meant. I say originally because they also have evolved so much
(especially with Mao’s transition from traditional to simplified characters in
order to boost the literacy rate) that it is difficult to tell what the
characters mean just by looking at them.
I suppose that they could be considered a morpho-logographic language.
I would agree with Wolf that Strauss’ argument that learning
the way we do through a phonemic/alphabetic is “unnatural” as opposed to
learning through a logographic system. Working with Chinese kids, I know that
learning characters is almost as difficult as learning the alphabet. I teach three and 4 year olds who can
recognize more English than Chinese at this point, because, well, Chinese is
hard.
I would like to discuss this a bit more in my next post, so
stay tuned!
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