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Is he a Reader?Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 09:26:49 +0100 From: Timothy Mason (tmason@timothyjpmason.com) To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum (FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU) Charles Adamson's points about the differences between reading and writing are, of course, sensible. However, I believe that the distinction is more radical than he implies ; once a language becomes written, the ways in which people think about it, and use it, change completely. Most of the rules that we are conscious of are rules that derive from the fact that our language is written. Our speech itself is permeated with characteristics that are proper to written language, and the languages of power and authority are those that adhere most closely to the written forms. This is even true of those items which we think of as (over)relaxed ; 'ain't', for example, has, it seems to me, become a part of the language through its being picked up and used by writers as a literary indicator of social status. Confined to a particular population prior to this - other sub-groups had other realizations of the standard from 'I am not' - it became generalized through novels and then through the scripts of films. (I remember my father using it in a way that denoted verbal quotation ; it was a kind of joke about Americans). 'Ain't' has become quasi-acceptable, with a slight touch of the wide-boy about it, while 'asn't', 'amn't' or 'antn't' draw but a faint smile of contempt. By and large, when there's a battle about some term or other, it's a battle between members of the literate classes. Learning a language like French or English as an FL is, therefore, far more difficult than would have been passing from one pre-literate tongue to another. The conception of sentences as necessarily having subjects, verbs and often objects is literary - which is perhaps one reason why Stephen Krahsen can rightly claim that reading is a fine route through to language. We all talk like books.
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