Writing about writing in Mozambique

Posted on April 23, 2012 by David Ker

I did my first research trip to Mozambique in March and it was very fruitful. I spent many hours observing classroom writing practices in a primary school. Everyone at the school and the school district was just incredibly open and helpful.Being crammed into a little desk at the back of a packed classroom has taught me a lot.

I’ll be sharing about some of my research at the upcoming SAALA/LSSA/SAALT conference held this year at the University of the Free State in South Africa.

Some of the things I’m noticing are:

  • The incredible importance of the chalkboard in making school happen.
  • The effect of L1 and L2 on the”affordances” of spoken and written modes.
  • The helpfulness of Bernstein’s Classification and Framing in looking at different disciplines (mathematics vs. art, for example)

I’ve always believed in the importance of mother-tongue literacy in a theoretical sort of way, but seeing teachers trying to educate a classroom full of kids in Portuguese has shown me in practice why L2 primary education is so problematic. Still that doesn’t mean that simply switching everything over to L1 is going to solve all your problems. The simple answer is: there are no simple answers to complex problems! Even so, my research is at least giving me a better understanding of the complexities.

As I’ve been researching this topic I’ve found it really hard to find linguistic studies that have been done on these topics:

  • Chalkboard and notebook writing in the classroom
  • The effect of L1 and L2 on writing

I’m busy writing chapters of my thesis and haven’t quite figured out how much of my research I can share on a public blog. While I’m sorting that out, if you have questions about my research please feel free to comment or send me an email (kanyimbe@gmail.com).

Two more research trips are scheduled for May and June.

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Flood Damage Dwarfs Repair Budget: cohesion and coherence

Posted on March 1, 2012 by David Ker

I suppose it is a side effect of academic study that as one masters the discipline, one loses the ability to communicate about it in plain language. This is sadly ironic in the case of linguistics where one would expect practitioners to be conscious of the effect of their words on others but, alas, the majority of linguists are very poor communicators.

In my studies of multimodal analysis in the last few months I have struggled to find an intelligible explanation of the textual metafunction which is one of the three pillars of Systemic Functional Grammar. I first encountered it in Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images. Compared to the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions, the textual metafunction gets scant coverage. And that is pretty much the trend in the rest of the literature on multimodal analysis that I have surveyed so far.

So in this post I want to attempt to define the textual metafunction and then think a bit about why it is the runt of the metafunction litter. We’ll begin with this brief phrase from the Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics: “The last metafunction, the textual, serves to ensure that the utterance achieves relevance in a context.” (p. 629) The book goes on to explicate “achieves relevance” by saying it’s a matter of cohesion and coherence. Now these two terms are widely used in linguistics and almost impossible to keep straight.

The basic difference between these terms as they are used in linguistics is as follows:

  • COHESION: How a text holds together
  • COHERENCE: How well a text makes sense

So when we talk about cohesion, we’re thinking about the internal structure of a text (or utterance, or multimodal ensemble, etc.). Strictly speaking we can say this is a question of grammaticality. Is the text well-formed in terms of grammar and syntax?

Coherence has to do with how the text is perceived by someone else. If someone creates a message they usually expect it to be understood by the intended hearer (or reader, etc.).

Let’s look at an example using a crash blossom cited at Language Log blog.

Example 1: Flood Damage Dwarfs Repair Budget (source)

After reading this sentence, I have two questions for you: Is it cohesive? And is it coherent?

COHESIVE: The sentence is internally cohesive. It’s grammatical and the syntax is normal for English.

COHERENT: The sentence is not coherent. Taken as it is written it implies that there are creatures called “flood damage dwarfs” that are repairing the budget. We recognize this as a headline because of the omitted definite article “the” but it is the grammar of the genre itself that creates ambiguity and leaves the text “incoherent.” It doesn’t make sense, or at least it is seriously (or should I say hilariously?) puzzling.

Returning to the Routledge text, coherence “accounts for how speakers and writers create coherent texts, texts that ‘hang’ together through exophoric reference, reference outside the text to the immediate context or to the broader cultural one.” (p. 629) [Note: "exophoric" is a fancy way of saying "outside of the text"] So the ambiguity of this headline results in a less coherent text than, for example, if the headline had said, “Repair Budget is dwarfed by flood damage.”

Kress has recently given a good example of how cohesion of multimodal ensembles affects their coherence. In What is mode?, a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (2009), Kress looks at a page from a science text which shows text and images and asks if changing the layout of the page affects its coherence. He writes, “For the textual function I can ask, ‘Are there texts which are incoherent internally and which do not cohere with their environment?’” (p. 59. Emphasis by Kress) Now here you can see, if my distinction between cohesion and coherence is accepted, that Kress has conflated the two terms. However, he is thinking about the same things, that is, the internal structure vs. the external perception. [Note: I think the problem is that English doesn't have a verb "to cohese."]

I wonder why there has been a neglect of the textual metafunction in multimodal analysis. Perhaps because Kress and van Leeuwen were focused on the ideational and, especially, the interpersonal metafunctions in Reading Images, subsequent studies haven’t known quite what to do with the textual metafunction. I think their ambiguity about the textual metafunction can be traced back to SFG scholars who also have not had much to say about it. At least for me, simply framing it in terms of cohesion and coherence does provide a lot of explanatory power when looking at a text.

Comments and corrections are welcome.

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Ubuntu that looks like Windows

Posted on February 27, 2012 by David Ker

One of the frustrations in helping newbies switch to Ubuntu is the fact that Ubuntu looks and acts very different. Because of that, all the hard-won skills of many years of Windows use are now useless and a person has to not only try a new operating system but learn new ways of working. The Linux purists would tell you that Windows is terrible, insecure and inefficient. If you ask them a little more they might say things like, “But using the Terminal to run commands is so much more efficient than using the GUI.” That just shows that a lot of them aren’t really in touch with the end user. Now for quite a long time Ubuntu used something called Gnome. It was a desktop that looked sort of like an old dorky version of Windows. Instead of putting the start button, etc. on the bottom of the window, Gnome put it on the top. Yippee! Then starting with Ubuntu 11.04, something called Unity came out that took all the old menus away and replaced it with this strip of big icons along the left side of the screen. There are some nice features of Unity but in general lots and lots of people hate it. Why? Too much change for a start. I used to know where to find something in the menus and now it has disappeared and I’m supposed to search for it. The second reason people hate Unity is that it is very inflexible. The famous Linux value of customization went out the window and now you get to do it their way! Want the icons smaller? Can’t do it. Want the bar on the right side of the screen instead of the left? Can’t do it? Want to add or change anything. Sorry, you can’t.

So I’ve tried some alternatives. These include adding Gnome 3 as a desktop option. Another that I have used with a lot of success is Cairo. Both of these allow lots and lots of customization. But they still require quite a lot of setup and fiddling, including the dreaded Terminal.

A new option I discovered last week is the Linux distribution called Zorin. Zorin is based on Ubuntu 11.04 but it has two features that are really terrific if you want to recommend a version of Ubuntu to a newbie. First, almost everything works as soon as you install Zorin. You can watch movies. You can play mp3s. And lots of software is preinstalled that you don’t find on the standard version of Ubuntu. One big example is Wine which allows you to run Windows applications inside of Ubuntu. So for example, I was able to install Picasa 3.9 and have it run right the first time. In Ubuntu 11.10, you have to install Wine and then install Picasa and then… it still doesn’t work.Having everything built in makes Zorin a nice option for installations where unlimited Internet isn’t available.

The second thing that makes Zorin really nice is that it is designed to look and operate like Windows. By default it looks like Windows 7 but you can change the Look to Windows XP if you prefer. An operating system that looks and feels like Windows is very important for people with limited computer skills. Here in Africa I often work with people who have had some experience with Windows and often that experience is very visually oriented. So they know where to look for the Start button and where to look for File and Edit and View. Ubuntu (and the latest version of Microsoft Office) has thrown out all those visual cues and it is very hard for newbies to adjust to that. Zorin might be a good option in cases where people have an acquaintance with Windows but would like to be able to use Free and Open Source Software.

Internationalization is excellent with almost all windows, menus and applications displaying correctly in Portuguese when I installed that language pack.

One word of warning. Zorin has some stability issues. I have noticed a few programs crash on it. And it has frozen for me a time or two. Also, the Zorin developers have chosen not to update Zorin to the latest version of Ubuntu because they are having some compatibility issues. It remains to be seen whether Zorin will continue to be developed or whether someone else will pick up this excellent concept and create a distribution with long term staying power.

For now, I’ve switched over to Zorin and find it a nice alternative to Unity.

For more information: http://zorin-os.com/

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Schoolbook vs. Textbook in South Africa

Posted on February 13, 2012 by David Ker

I continue to be intrigued by the schoolbooks created by students in the course of their studies. These start out as A4 notebooks that are then covered by plastic. This is a yearly ritual that is really labor intensive. Once they have been covered in plastic (and some sort of cover page is retroactively added), they become “schoolbooks” in which students make notes, paste in handouts and complete homework. I won’t try to describe all the varieties of notebooks I’ve seen. Here’s a photo of schoolbooks for two Grade 5 boys:

From research

Next, we’ll focus on a schoolbook and textbook for the same subject, mathematics.

Here they are side-by-side:

From research

Here is a sample of the contents from the schoolbook (left):

From research

And here’s a sample of the contents of the textbook (right):

From research

The textbook is quite stunning, with colorful designs and professional layout. In comparison the schoolbook looks decidedly second-rate. A photocopy has been glued into the schoolbook, and the child has had to create his own “worksheet” of math problems.

But the important difference between these two books comes down to use. The textbook, although beautiful is hardly used at all. There are pages and pages with exercises and activities but it has all been untouched. This was one of the few pages on which the student had written. The schoolbook on the other hand is heavily used. There are many pages of math problems that have been copied down and then solved. Photocopies of math exercises have been pasted in. It’s a messy but very dynamic text.

You can imagine something coming out in the news about “Schools still haven’t received textbooks!” And one might take this as a sign that education isn’t happening. But here we have a case where textbooks were available but still the teacher preferred to use the “grassroots” schoolbooks. Of course we can’t know how many of the textbooks were available. Maybe this student was one of the few who actually had a textbook while many other students either couldn’t find a copy or couldn’t afford to buy one. My wife knows firsthand how tricky it is to locate all the textbooks for your children. She drove all over the Southern Suburbs and even purchased books online. It’s unlikely that such options were available to all the parents in this area.

What I’d really like to know is how effective are schoolbooks vs. textbooks when it comes to learning a subject. While the textbooks are more visually appealing, they lack the physicality of the schoolbooks. In order to fill their schoolbooks, students had to copy information off the chalkboard and paste photocopies. All this multisensory stimulus could serve as a way of focusing attention on the topic at hand. If a child simply has to read the contents of a textbook, there aren’t many ways to confirm whether this has been done. The text is already there.

I’d like to suggest that the deficit discourse which Grassroots Literacy espouses is not the only way of approaching texts like these. As we’ve seen here the schoolbooks have many advantages over their textbook equivalents.

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Postmodern IsiXhosa Picturebooks

Posted on February 13, 2012 by David Ker

I stumbled on a link to the complete PDF of the book Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Pardoy and Self-Referentiality. It’s a fascinating book although I’m not sure Routledge would be happy to see their book being given away for free by the Ferdowski University of Mashhad in Iran. Google Scholar seems to be quite good at finding strange copies of books that have been uploaded without proper security. Anyhow, back to our topic.

On the same morning I also came across Hannah Morris’ MA dissertation from Stellenbosch entitled: Tall Enough? An illustrator’s visual inquiry into the production and consumption of isiXhosa picture books in South Africa. This is a legal download unlike the last one although the file was uploaded without the PDF extension so you need to change the filename before it is readable. Although the dissertation is about visual arts it really touches on a lot of topics that are quite fascinating for those of us who are interested in seeing more books published in African languages.

Morris also touches on the subject of postmodernity. One aspect of postmodernity that I don’t think either text really comes to terms with is the inherent postmodernity of minority language publishing. While Morris bemoans the lack of publications in isiXhosa I think she doesn’t really recognize that in these postmodern times with the exception of a few books printed usually in English, there is an awful lot of minority language publishing going on. The Internet has first of all created conditions in which anyone can publish anything they want in whatever language they want. Because we are unaware of publishing going on doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening. And there are many nonelite forms like MIXit, SMS and newspapers that are mostly in forms other than English. As Stanley Ridge said in his keynote address at last year’s English Society of South Africa conference, Zulu newspapers are thriving in Kwa-Zulu Natal while English and Afrikaans newspapers are slowly dying.

So it is possible that truly postmodern picturebooks (or perhaps picturebooks in late modernity would be a better term) are increasingly going to be in languages other than English. Or maybe they already are. There’s so much going on out there that we are totally clueless about. OK, I think I’m done writing now. Download the two texts above and enjoy.

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Cape Town Street Trolley: arbitrary signs

Posted on February 13, 2012 by David Ker

I’m not sure what you expected to see when you saw the words “Cape Town Street Trolley” in the title of this post. But it was probably something like this:

But what I was actually thinking about was something like this:
Trolley Pusher Mofolo

This is an example of the semiotic concept of “signs” and how they are arbitrary. If you’re in Portugal and hear the word “cow” you might be tempted to think about the thing that eats grass and makes milk. But in Portuguese “cão” means “dog.” This is a sign used as symbol. Although the sign [kaow] is identical (or nearly) it has a different meaning depending on whether we are speaking Portuguese or English.

Signs can also be indexical, that is they indicate something else. So, if I hear the sound “ring-ring” I know that a phone is ringing and someone wants to talk to me. The sign indicates something else. The shadow on the east side of the house tells me that it is afternoon and the sun is going down in the west.

Finally, signs can be iconic, meaning that they represent, or look like, something else. So my profile picture on Facebook is not me but it represents me.

symbol, icon and index for "cat" (Picture by the David Ker)

Now, the question I’ve yet to resolve for myself is when do signs cease to be linguistic?

Are the three trolleys pictured below being used to communicate and thus are worthy of linguistic study?

Sources: 1, 2, 3 (See also: http://lizatlancaster.co.za/blog/even-sollys-trolley-is-flying-the-flag)

In my post about the Grade 5 boy’s notebook, we saw that he used many signs to communicate. In addition to the words (symbolic) written on the page, there were drawings (iconic), speech bubbles (iconic), and borders (indexical), titles and more. A proper linguistic study of that notebook would have to look at all the means of communication that were employed and how they were used in combination as multimodal ensembles to signify something greater than the sum of the parts.

Semiotics has helped me understand a lot of things that always puzzled me in Mozambique. Why did people carry flash drives around their necks like a fashion accessory? It was indexical of a certain type of employment or social status. Why did illiterate women carry Bibles to church in a language they didn’t even speak. Again, it was indexical of the discourse “membro duma igreja” (church member). Semiotics possibly explains why local-language literacy is such an uphill battle. Despite the materials being effective as a symbol (language carrying meaning), the use of the mother tongue is indexical as nonelite and backwards. And their cheap “look” in comparison with national language publications is iconic of their undesirability.

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Directions, again. Design as mode.

Posted on February 10, 2012 by David Ker

In my previous post (Directions as a multimodal discourse) I looked at a variety of modes for the discourse “Directions to 56 Barrack Street.” When a person wants to get to a new address, he or she can call on a variety of modes to do so which include everything from asking someone to looking on a map to allowing a voice-controlled GPS to guide you there. Now I want to talk about the idea of Design which, if I understand Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory correctly, is a more sophisticated way of talking about modes.

In the Introduction (pp. 4-8), the authors talk about “four domains of practice” in which meanings are made. These are discourse, design, production and distribution. Discourse we have already considered. But I want to reconfigure what I wrote about modes in terms of design which Kress and van Leeuwen define as “(uses of) semiotic resources, in all semiotic modes and combinations of semiotic modes.” (5) In other words, talking about design rather than mode allows us to talk about what happens when modes are being used simultaneously. So in the case of the man who was giving me directions to Home Affairs, the discourse was “directions to 56 Barrack Street.” But he designed his message as a combination of vocal and gestural modes by talking me through the steps of getting to Home Affairs while gesturing at the same time.

This is probably a good time to bring in two other pieces of terminology: articulation and interpretation. Articulation is how a person designs a discourse. Interpretation is how a person interprets a discourse (8-9). So, the nice man articulated his discourse by stepping outside the building and talking me through a long series of steps accompanied by gestures. I could have tried to interpret everything he said but I quickly realized this was TMI, too much information! So I just listened politely and then took the one piece of information (the street address) and designed a different discourse ensemble (Google Maps and GPS plus my wife navigating using visual cues).

Returning to the four domains of practice, domain three and four are production and distribution. The City of Cape Town produces street signs and distributes them along the street (Not enough as it turns out). Google Maps produces maps on the fly and distributes them on a web page that can be accessed on computers, phones and more.

What I like about these last two domains is that it ties in very nicely with my dissertation. How discourses (like bilingual education material) are produced and distributed are crucial to how they are interpreted. In the case of a history textbook for example that isn’t available in the particular classroom in a particular Mozambican language there are far-reaching consequences. Another mode must be designed for example a teacher using a Portuguese textbook which he translates and reads to the classroom. These are just different designs of the same discourse, the history textbook.

The first post on this topic: Directions as a multimodal discourse

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Directions as a multimodal discourse

Posted on February 10, 2012 by David Ker

I’m slowly working my way through Kress and van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. While Reading Images was concerned with the printed page and the mixture of text, images and ornamentation, In Multimodal Discourse, the authors have tried to broaden the theory to account for  all modes of communication based on “analysis of the specificities and common traits of semiotic modes which takes account of their social, cultural and historical production, of when and how the modes of production are specialized or multi-skilled, hierarchical or team-based, of when and how technologies are specialized or multi-purpose, and so on.” (p. 4)

In other words they want a really big theory that accounts for anything. In the process of describing this theory they’ve confused me at almost every turn. Some of the theorizing they admit is inconsistent and incomplete (see the Preface). Is color a mode? Is the type and thickness of paper a mode? Gestures? Tone of voice? Architectural features of buildings? The reader is right in asking, “What isn’t a mode then?” Of course this type of theorizing is just a way of proving the center by starting from the boundaries. Whereas traditionally discourse has been conceptualized as speech reduced to typewritten form and then analyzed in splendid isolation, social semiotics shows how many things go into communication and how vested it is in human interaction.

As a way of getting my head around the basics of Kress and van Leeuwen’s book I’m going to look at “Directions,” that is, how do we get information about how to arrive at an unknown destination. I’ll do that by looking at some of my recent travels (or should I say travails) around Cape Town.

Home Affairs

At the beginning of the year, I needed to go to Home Affairs and begin the process of applying for a study permit. I had visited Home Affairs before and so it was easy to locate with a little help from my wife who was giving me directions from the passenger’s seat. But this time when I arrived, I discovered that Home Affairs had moved. There was a sign on the door saying “Home Affairs is now located at 56 Barrack Street.” After studying the sign for a moment, I approached someone sitting behind a reception desk and asked where 56 Barrack Street was. He helpfully left his desk, came out of the building with me and began to describe in heavily accented English and much gesturing how to get to 56 Barrack Street. After he was done, I thanked him, took one more look at the sign and then got into my car and looked up 56 Barrack Street on my smart phone. Google Maps located it (although it was mislabeled) and I was even able to turn Navigation on and have my phone talk me through the process of getting to 56 Barrack Street.

Home Affairs in Cape Town labeled Faircape Management by Google Maps

Now, in the preceding paragraph you can see a variety of modes that were used to get directions. First, there was my unspoken recollection (mode: memory) of where I thought Home Affairs was located. That was accompanied by my wife giving me instructions (mode: speech) from the passenger seat. Then I saw the sign (mode: printed announcement) which was followed by someone giving me directions (modes: speech and gestures). After that we looked up the directions on Google Maps (mode: Internet web resource) and then made use of navigation: (mode: visual and voice GPS).

Each of these modes has its own advantages and disadvantages. The helpful man knew where it was and was able to give me very specific directions. But I couldn’t understand his speech very well and there were so many steps that I didn’t even try to remember them all. Instead I remembered only that physical address “56 Barrack Street” and turned to Google Maps to help me. Google Maps is very powerful but as you can see in the image it mislabeled the place I was going to and the map itself had far too many details to absorb (especially while driving). GPS Navigation had the advantage of locating where my car was and planning out a route that would put me near 56 Barrack Street. But it wasn’t aware of traffic congestion and route changes due to road construction.

Multimodal Discourse analysis would say that Directions is a discourse and that it is able to be expressed in a variety of modes. Which modes I was able to tap into would determine how I went about getting to Home Affairs and the relative ease of doing so. A month later, I was on the train heading for Home Affairs again. This time I could call on my previous knowledge. I knew Home Affairs had moved to 56 Barrack Street and that this was located in walking distance of the Cape Town train station. I verified the location on Google Maps. I noticed that as I walked to Home Affairs I would have to pass Longmarket, Caledon and Albertus streets. The next street is Barrack Street. So I confidently headed toward my destination, passed Longmarket, but then I ran into trouble. I didn’t see a sign for Caledon, or Albertus, or Barrack. I walked as far as the Parliament and realized I was lost (mode: visual). I looked up my destination again on Google Maps and discovered I had overshot Barrack Street. Turning around I headed back two blocks, saw a sign for Barrack Street and carried on to my destination.

In this second trip we can see that another mode, street signs, didn’t work out for me very well. Partly this is because not every street had a sign at the intersection. But also, the Google Map I had referenced gave me less detail than I needed. I didn’t realize that Longmarket, Caledon and Albertus are just three of many streets in that area and in fact Albertus didn’t connect with the street I was on.

So where are we? Multimedia discourse has given us a way of talking about a large number of disparate activities as actually belonging to a single discourse: directions. By considering each mode in turn we’ve been able to see the strengths and weaknesses of each mode and also see how they are often used together to guide human behavior.

I called on a rich set of modes in order to achieve my goal of getting to 56 Barrack Street. A person with only a street address would have to rely on other modes such as maps, asking for directions on the street, and probably a lot of wandering around.

What happened once I got inside the door is another story. I had to find out where to go, which line to stand in, how to participate in the choreography of seating. But that’s a discourse for another day!

Follow-up to this post: Directions, again. Design as mode.

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Describing a text by a Grade 5 boy in South Africa

Posted on February 7, 2012 by David Ker

INTRODUCTION

I did a trial run yesterday of photographing a text and discussing it with the child who made it. This assignment was done in June of last year and the boy still vividly remembered the experience and could recite quite a lot of the poem from memory.

I discovered that you really need to have the original writer present in order to understand how the text was produced. It would also be good to have a separate session with the teacher to ask about how (and why) the text was produced.

THE TEXT

From research

TRANSCRIPTION

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Date: 6 February 2012
Location: Our house
Present: me (D), Grade 5 boy (B) and his older sister (G) and brother
Image reference: IMG 1963 (6 Feb 2012)
Image title: “20 June 2011 – Katana (Poem)”

[0:38]
D: OK let me ask you one more question while I’ve got you here. This one that I like so much. This one here, mmm. You made this nice picture of a dog and a cat
B: Yeah. (text)
D: What was the assignment here?  Did they give you the Engl… you had to write down the English and then write uh Xhosa underneath it? Or the other way / around it?
B: / It’s a poem!
[0:56]
D: But which came first? Did you write the … the  Xhosa poem and then you translated it into English?
B: No we just wrote it.
D: Was it on the board or something? Katana katana?
B: Yeah [starts reciting in sing-song voice] “Katana, katana. Molo Katana uyaphi na katana? Ndiya edolophini. Uyakuthen-ni ((mispronounces word)) ntoni? Ndiya… I can’t remember right now / (text)
D: / ((Laughter)) OK and then you had to write the what it meant in   English up above?
B: ((Begins reciting again)) Ndiyakutherg’u mquez uminqwazyz
[1:35]
D: And then what about the picture? Was that on the board too or did you make that up yourself?
B: ((High squeaky voice)) I made that picture (text)
G: What’s the poem about?
B: It’s… about Kitten kitten hello kitten where are you going Kitten? I’m going to town. What are you buying? Um I’m going to buy a hat. I’ve never seen a cat with a hat.
D: What’s the dog saying here?
B: ((Sing-song voice)) Uyaphi na katana? Where are you going?
[transcription ends at 2:02]

KEY TO TRANSCRIPTION (Adapted from Rampton, 2006:xviii)

[0:38] Time on recording
((text)) “Stage directions”
(text) indistinct voice or best guess by transcriptionist
… short pause

DESCRIBING THE TEXT

There are several typical features of this text: the border is universal in schoolwork that I’ve seen by kids at all ages. Usually done with a colored pen or pencil, you could look at the way borders sub-divide work in the notebooks by assignment or topic. Different colored pens were used for the text: black for Xhosa and red for English. In this assignment, the Xhosa came first, the English was added and the drawing was added last. You can see evidence of rewriting and correction. From the recording it sounds like there was quite a lot of reciting in class in order to memorize the poem.

Jewitt and others, following Kress, would call this page a multimodal ensemble, that is, a combination of text and image using different media. It’s quite common to see handouts glued on to the notebook page for an added layer of complexity. See for example this image:

From research

In this image you can also see the collaboration between the student and the teacher, as errors were pointed out and corrected and then the grade for the test was updated (“9+2″).

ANALYSIS

Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images and Multimodal Discourse could be used to analyze these kinds of pictures although that might be overkill. Cox has two books that could be used for analyzing such texts: The Pictorial World of the Child and Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure. Blommaert’s Grassroots Literacy would also come into play. I’m still searching for a similar study of children’s school texts. English Studies in Africa vol 49-1 has a number of articles that are helpful but nothing exactly like this.

While the analysis of the texts themselves is interesting, I think it’s even more interesting to step back and look at what is happening in the process of text-making. In this class, the teacher is engaging the students in a book-making activity. For this particular class the student’s didn’t receive a textbook at the beginning of the year which they would then proceed to work through. Instead they began with a tabula rasa, a blank notebook, that over the course of the year was filled with didactic materials about Xhosa.

So in the absence of an “official” text, a rather dynamic classroom text is created which is stamped with the individual style of each child. The lack of a textbook can be seen as a deficit but it can also be seen as a strength. The teacher is not tied to a textbook that may or may not be appropriate for her students. She can customize lesson plans and activities to the level and interests of her students. But what I hadn’t appreciated until looking at these texts is how the text-making activity reinforces the information being transferred to the students. In other words, by forcing a child to write down the information, it is hammered into their heads through reading, copying, and verification in a way that wouldn’t happen if for example the kids simply had access to the Katana poem in their Xhosa book. Prior to this I had really been focused on how errors of transmission might creep into texts in the process of being transferred from book to chalkboard to notebook. But I can now better appreciate how this “grassroots” literacy is actually more effective in helping kids to absorb information.

While the lack of textbooks in South Africa is universally bewailed, I’ve never read anything talking about these amazing notebooks that are created by children. They are evidence of a great deal of creativity on the part of the teacher and the students. And I think their rather rigid format (colored borders, etc.) and tangibility results in a permanent record of what was learned by the children in a way that glossy textbooks might conceal.

When I go to Mozambique next month I expect to find that teachers and kids have less resources: cheap notebooks rather than the hardcover kind found in South Africa and a single ballpoint pen rather than a fistful of colored pencils and pens. But even so, it’s likely that they are engaged in similar text-making activities in the absence of official textbooks.

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Textual analysis of graffiti

Posted on January 26, 2012 by David Ker

In thinking about the kinds of writing practices that I will encounter in Mozambique, I’ve been wondering what to do about graffiti. Is it really a writing practice? Does language use tell us anything? There’s certainly a continuum between “official” publications and notices that go on the wall and illegal scribblings and tags that are put there. Off the top of my head I would expect that graffiti would be a language of outsiders or protest and that the language used might be a signal of something. I remember in Tete that it was quite common to see little “registration plates” on the backs of bicycles that were always written in Nyungwe. Mwathu muno– “our things here” is one example I remember. Slogans on minibuses and taxis were also common but usually in Portuguese. Well, I digress.

If a child wanted to vandalize a wall, he or she might choose the wider language while if it was a message sent to a family member in a neighboring town it might be sent in the local language.

From research

Here’s an example of some “CRAK” graffiti on a wall near our house:

From research

For more examples of graffiti, look through my collection here: Research.

Three links worth checking out on the subject are:

I don’t think graffiti will be a major part of my research but I do think you need to be able to account for it and compare it to more legitimatized forms of writing by children.

Some interesting things, sociolinguistically speaking, about graffiti are:

  1. Power relationships: This includes not just the relationship between the graffitist and the authorities but also between other graffitists.
  2. Language use: There’s certainly an element of anti-language. But also multilingualism comes into play.
  3. Discourse: Texts are highly collaborative. They are ornamented and are defaced. Graffiti is written in response to other graffiti.
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