And in fact, if we really think hard,
that not only does this represent the kind of complex
meanings that happened In the world of new media, digital media, the internet today.
Therefore, that means that we have to expand our notions of literacy.
But in fact even traditionally, there were all kinds of relationships,
in other words written meanings were also spatial.
Spoken meanings were also, had an audio component which is porosity.
That often there was gestural many as closely connected for
example, in theater and drama.
So, even in traditional genres of literacy, the mono model,
alphabetical reading and writing view of literacy was excessively narrow.
But in this era,
it's just crazily narrow in terms of the transformations we've seen over the last
couple of decades, particularly around the emergence of digital media.
So we've built here this kind of schema.
And what we've done,
I'm going to go around each of the modes in this circle now and discuss them.
What we've done is we've deliberately separated oral and
written meanings because they are unbelievably different.
So, one of the real problems with teaching phonics in a rule-bound kind of way,
it assumes the relationship between a reality and literacy between writing and
speaking is simply a transliteration of speech.
Well, it's not.
The last, if you went back and passed what I've just said, and
I'm not speaking to a written script, I'm speaking to these diagrams,
I'm speaking conversationally, there are no sentences.
There would have been sentences if I was reading a script, but I'm not.
There are no sensors.
It's just a crazy jumble of clauses one after the other.
A bit redundant, a bit chaotic because that's what all the mind can do if you're
just speaking, if you're not reading a script.
Reading a script it's a different exercise, by the way,
that's simply reading out writing.
That's not really oral language.
So, anyhow, if you do that there are no sentences, there are no paragraphs,
it's just this kind of, and also it's very very redundant.
When we write, we carefully don't repeat things.
We look back over what we've done.
It's very concise, it's tight, it's well-structured.
Orality in its nature, it's ephemeral,
it disappears on us, it can't be well structured.
It's sort of rambling and repetitive and that's what orality is like.
So one thing we want to do is say the grammar of orality and
the grammar of literacy are very, very different from each other.
As different as the other modes which I'm going to speak about in a second.
And in fact that's why in some senses orality is close to audio.
And in some senses written is close to visual.
And the difference is There is many similarities and
differences as there are between oral and written.
>> If we take seriously, that meaning-making happens through oral
meaning-making, through written meaning-making, visual meaning-making,
spatial, gestural, and audio, what mental language do we have for
understanding the patterns that emerge in those spaces.
We have a metalanguage for a linguistic meaning-making and we call it grammar.
But what is possible for us?
How do we enable a learner to see the relationship
between the different modes and the peculiarities within each mode?