(Here is my attempt at multimodality). I saw this band in the early nineties in a tiny club in Chicago. They were great. Alas, in 1999, the lead singer had a heart attack while performing and died….
At the beginning of this article, I was struggling to understand what was being said and the going was tough. However, at the end of the article, the author presented 2 histories which were quite fascinating and really helped me understand the points of the article.
One of the stories was about a man named Sam May, whose understanding of literacy came mainly by paying attention to those of somewhat higher station, such as his military superiors and “upper crust” of his home town. One particular quote stood out “I was exposed to some pretty high class people early in life-and they took me in. They used proper grammar in their talking, their speech and their actions were geared such that you felt comfortable with them”. I was impressed with how articulate he was here.
On the other hand, Sam also became fascinated with emerging technologies, such as movies and secret code rings offered on radio shows. Sam mentions the movies as inspiration for shows that the local children would put on.
The second story was about a man named Charles Randolph whose father was a preacher who was known for having very organized sermons. His father’s preaching influenced his own writing and received a degree in English and became an English teacher. He remarks about how his professors became upset when his writing was a bit too flowery for their liking and they told him to “stop bleeding on the paper”.
The use of these stories to illustrate the influence of environments and changing technologies on literacy has made me think a bit about my own teaching in the sense that perhaps I would be clearer to my own students if I told more stories. The rest of my lectures may be as difficult for my students to parse as much of the rest of these articles are for me.
The story telling element also reminds me about the article about orality in language. In that article, it was mentioned that only a small percentage of languages have a written component. In such societies with little written culture, story telling is likely to be a major way of passing on history and wisdom. While the writing may not remain, many of the folk tales do and some of these find their way to us by scribes who have learned our written language.
