Apr

26

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are; you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe. [Internet meme].

The realization that visual literacy is contextual, that individual words can retain their integrity of meaning, even with multiple misspellings, if their sentence structure remains intact was an offshoot of Chomsky's revelation about universal grammar. Unfortunately, it led to conclusions and results far more vicious that his political theories have. Beginning in the 1970s the professional education establishment decided that reading could be taught by words rather than syllables, and that spelling was optional. The tedious repetition of the alphabet and the learning of words through syllables could be dispensed with, and the social tyranny of "proper" English could be overthrown. What this marvelous theory of "whole word" education failed to consider was that language first enters the brain through the ear and not the eye. Learning to read is a matter of attaching symbols to sounds. What the theory also ignored was that the writing systems that had a symbol for every syllable — cuneiform, hieroglyphs, Chinese — were inordinately difficult compared to alphabetical ones — and that no writing system, not even Chinese, was purely ideographic — i.e. with each symbol representing a word.

The result was that the mega industry of pre-school, Head Start, et. al. — the educational-civil servant complex — had produced a literacy rate lower for the country than it had been in 1820, when there was no public education at all. In deciding to throw away the alphabet and the wonder of its extraordinary fuzzy logic (26 characters being able to symbolize millions of syllable sequences), the whole-word theorists were following the logic of Chomsky's original bias against commerce itself. After all, our American alphabet has its origins with the Greek traders and pirates who took up Phoenician alphabetic writing as a way of keeping tallies on their inventory and plunder and placing orders for the next trade.


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2 Comments so far

  1. Jeff Watson on April 26, 2008 8:34 pm

    I absolutely love to make fun of Noam Chomsky, who manages to destroy the written word in the best spirit of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. While he is a brilliant linguist, when he steps out of his specialty, he usually inserts his foot into his mouth. My son told me about a computer program that he has, known as a Chomskybot. This program creates paragraphs, that at first sight seem erudite. Upon closer inspection, the paragraphs are total gibberish. I couldn’t get him to send me his program but found a link to one on the net.

    http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl

    Very entertaining stuff indeed.

    Jeff

  2. George Parkanyi on April 28, 2008 3:50 pm

    The effect in your scrambled introductory paragraph is what makes it very difficult for me to get the first, second, or even third drafts of my blog posts out without typos. They’re darned stubborn to ferret out because even in proof-reading contextual thinking masks the errors. (The blog site - it’s Wordpress in fact - doesn’t have a spell-checker that I’m aware of). In fact lately I find that in typing out sentences I sometimes miss whole words, never mind letters. Contextual illusion - or old age? :)

    Cheers,
    GP

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