Literacy and the language awareness hypothesis

ABSTRACT

In the study of reading and writing, the concept of language awareness has come forward for increased attention: that awareness of language form and pattern may be a central contributing factor that explains learning beyond basic beginning level attainment. Cross-cultural and cross-language evidence from different disciplines is important to take into account for a better understanding of the cognitive processes that explain the language awareness factor. Examples from the multilingual Western Hemisphere, from the contact between the American and European languages, are especially relevant because of the time scale of available data (over 2000 years for the first full writing system, successfully deciphered) and the closeness of contact and extensive interaction between the languages (over 500 years). Among the most prominent and thoroughly studied are findings from historical and anthropological research on literacy in the Mayan and Nahuatl languages, the latter from the early Spanish colonial era, the former from the pre-classical period of Mayan civilisation. The findings from this work inform studies of literacy learning among all modern day indigenous language bilingual learners in both Latin America and North America. As an illustration, results from a bilingual (Nahuatl-Spanish) literacy learning project in Puebla state, Mexico, are summarised.

KEYWORDS:

• Metalinguistic awareness
• language awareness
• writing systems
• bilingualism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In contrast to the research on historical continuities between the oral tradition and literacy, the Nahuatl–Spanish bilingual project has only been able to provide correlational data from the comparison of performance on a series of spoken and written narrative tasks, suggesting so far a plausible working hypothesis for future investigation (Francis & Navarrete Gómez, 2014; Chireac & Francis, 2016).

2 This observation regarding the comparison between Mayan writing and Aztec pictography should actually go without saying. On a related point, researchers all acknowledge that the evidence of Mesoamerican writing and symbolic systems is based on a limited sample, documents that survived the massive purge and destruction of libraries and archives during the Spanish conquest. New discoveries might lead us to revise some descriptions and assessments. Until then we must rely on the available data, which nevertheless strongly support the conclusions of the Mayan writing investigators.

3 The close alignment of phonological constituents to graphemes is sometimes associated with expository writing, over and above other text types. But evidence from the study of script re-alignment in the design of new writing systems (e.g. adaptations from Literary Chinese to vernacular Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese) shows that the poetic genres required at least the same degree of close correspondence for purposes of faithful rendering of wording (Nguyễn, 1975; Phan and Francis, 2019).

4 A better concluding quote for the (1991) paper than the one from The Gutenberg Galaxy would have served clarity on the question of how phonology is represented in writing. In 1962, McLuhan didn’t have the benefit of recent findings on morphosyllabic literacy, reason for the error: ‘Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate men from the tribal to the civilized sphere … ’ (quoted in Olson, 1991: 27). Nevertheless, McLuhan should have suspected from indirect evidence (for one, the rapid development of modern literature and science in China beginning with the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911) that this assertion could not be correct. The research on writing systems has converged on the conclusion that, as does alphabetic writing, morphosyllabic writing encodes the relevant linguistic subsystems for complete transcription.