Literacy has several dimensions and may be viewed from different viewpoints. The three dimensions of literacy that are of particular interest to us are:
i) literacy as a skill involving the ability to control the visual (graphic) medium of language, and to use it for employing written language for achieving certain socio-cultural ends;
ii) literacy as an instance of mass-upsurge and a call for the participation of the socially deprived and economically disadvantaged illiterate masses in the heritage of written culture; and
iii) literacy as an enabling factor which, through syllogistic reasoning, linear codification of reality and the critical accumulation of knowledge, creates conditions conducive to linguistic innovation and imaginative creativity.
All the above dimensions may be studie3d from different viewpoints, viz., from the point of view of language planning, from the view-point of educational psychology, from the view-point of educational psychology, or from a purely linguistic point of view. In the present paper we wish to examine the various facets and dimensions of literacy form the linguistic point of view and try to establish clear relationships between speech and writing on the one hand, and between literacy and language use, on the other.
Linguacy, Articulacy and Literacy
Viewed within the broader perspective of 'linguacy', i.e., the linguistic potential for communication and expression, literacy may be regarded as an extension of the functional potential of language with regard to the channel of communication which involves reading and writing skills. Linguistic transmission takes place either through phonic substance (aural medium) involving the skills of speaking and listening (i.e., articulacy), or through the graphic substance (visual medium) involving the skills of reading and writing (i.e., literacy). Simply stated, then, literacy as a technique is the acquisition of skills in the control of the graphic substance and visual medium of language.
It is generally assumed that written language is essentially a graphic counterpart of speech and, in some ways, a substitute for language. This notion arises from an inability to see the vital difference between the oral and visual manifestation of one and the same 'form' in respect of the nature of the realisation (selection made from the same available grammar and lexicon of a language. Such a notion leads to a failure to see the consequences of literacy on languae use and language behaviour, on the one hand, and to a view of literacy as nothing but 'counterfeit articulacy', on the other. As such, it becomes essential to appreciate the apparent differences, as well as vital similarities, that exist between articulacy and literacy.
It is true that articulacy as one of the media of linguacy, is acquired first and in a spontaneous and automatic manner. Humankind's acquisition of the articulacy aspect of language is so unique and the oral medium and language patterns are so indissolubly integrated that only too often language and speech are taken to be synonymous. It is for this reason that the human species has been characterised as 'talking animal' or 'speech creature' and the 'homo sapiens' has been equated with 'homo loquens'.
This priority of the aural medium has seemed to some students of linguistics good grounds for denying the validity of a distinction between medium and language at all.... The sounds of speech would then actually be a part of language, rather than a medium for language, and the basic distinction would be not between language and medium but between language and writing (Abercrombie, 1987 : 18).
This views makes articulacy not only central to linguacy but also a part of the 'common denominator of cultures' (Murdoch, 1945). Since the basic channel for all linguistic communication is vocal-auditory and since this channel is universally available to all normal human beings, any generalisation about spoken language becomes also a hypothesis about human cultural universals (Hockett, 1963 : 14). It may be noted here that literacy is neither coterminous with language, as is articulacy, nor does it have universal appeal for characterising humans as 'writing animals' or 'graphic creatures'.
It is sometimes asserted that the human race started to be human when it began to use articulated sounds of language as a means of communication . Since language is unique to humans, and since no other organisms acquire language, it is maintained that the capacity for language (faculte de language) is constitutionally available to humans alone, and that language as a unique system of verbal behaviour (vocal sign) is species-specific. Langue (a specific language) as opposed to language is acquired in the process of interaction between humans and their socio-ecological setting (Lenneberg, 1967). It is through the vocal means of verbal communication that human beings begin their development from mere biological beings to social beings. As opposed to primitive gesture language, vocal language is a qualitatively transformed means of communication giving rise to speech communities with the aid of logical structures and formal systems - better known as grammars fo languages. It is for this reason that the term 'articulacy' can be used in two senses: in the broader sense it denotes the acquisition of grammar, as well as the use of grammar through the vocal auditory channel of communication (in Chomskian terms it is competence as well as performace), and in its narrower sense, it is merely an acquisition of the skill in the control of the oral medium of language (i.e., performance alone).
Writing is a cultural invention which come much later in the history of human development. But if culture is viewed as dependent on a human type cognitive process, it is also species-specific. If the capacity for language is the first turning point in human history where man as a biological being is identified as being qualitatively different from the rest of the animal beings, and the use of articulated sound-language is the vital point at which humans as biological beings are transformed into social beings, the invention and the use of writing as an institutionalised sign-system may be regarded as a significant uplifting of the human race in the distinct cultural dimension. No other cultural invention can be said to have exerted as great an influence on the upward development of the human race on the cultural and social plane as writing has done.
There is a general tendency to identify writing with articulacy, usually expressed in the form of a statement that writing is a device to record and a tool to represent speech. This is far from being true since writing is neither a substitute for articulacy nor an exact representation of the invention of writing must have been the need to supplement the spoken actualisation of the verbal sign.
There are frontiers where language as a purely phonetic medium of communication no longer suffices, where its limitations in space and time are no longer equal to the demands of the progressive development of civilisation, and man is obliged to devise a further tool for himself capable of overcoming these limitations. This new tool is writing (Jensen, 1970 : 15).
Writing, as already stated, is a late cultural invention and it comes later than articulacy in the history of individuals too. A child learns to speak and understand others speaking from the first year of his or her life. Children learn to exchange meanings with others. However, a time comes when all the acts of meaning the child wishes to perform cannot be performed by speaking/listening alone. From this point onwards, reading and writing "make more sense to him" (Halliday, 1978 : 206). Thus we not only learn to read and write for much the same reasons as we learn to speak and listen, but there are certain situational contexts in which reading and writing "make more sense" than speaking and listening. Thus for identity in absentia we still require the evidence of one's signature rather than one's voice-print. The point that we wish to emphasise here is that there is a functional complementarily between articulacy and literacy, i.e., between speech and writing. While certain domains skills, others can be appropriately handled by literacy skills.
The ontogenetic primacy of speech does in no way imply that writing is its derivative or that writing merely serves to mirror speech. The written word and the spoken word don not exist one for the other; rather they exist for what they represent, i.e., units of language. "The system of speech and the system of writing are thus only two realisations out of an infinite number of possible systems, of which no own can be said to be more fundamental than the other" (Uldall, 1944 : 7). Here one might cite the analogy of a poem (an abstraction) which may be realised as a written record or in the form of a recitation.
Because of the fact that speech and writing represent the same constructs of linguacy we get a parallelism between the two sets of primes:phoneme: allophone: phone, corresponding to grapheme:allograph:graph. In certain cases we also get synonymic correspondences between graphemes and phonemes viz., G D ½P½, for instance m D |m|
in English. However, since the two systems are two distinct and autonomous realisations we get certain oblique correspondences as follows (Gupta, 1971):
1) Polyphonemic: <G> -->| P1, P2, P3.....|
e.g., <C> -->| s~k | as in
cell, cycle, call, come, etc.
2) Synthetic: <G> -->| P1, + P2 |
e.g., <x> -->| k + s | ~ | g + z | as in
ox, box, exact, exit, etc.
3) Analytic: <G1+G2> -->|P|
e.g., <c + h> -->| k ~ ts| as in
chemist, chrome, church, chill, etc.4) Alternant: <G> -->|P| but |P| --><G1, G2, G3.....>
e.g., <f> -->| f | but | f | --><f ~ ph ~ gh> as in
fail, physics rough, etc.5) Auxiliary: <G> --> | f |
e.g., <k> -->| f | as in
knob, know, knee, etc.It is only when we promote, in our linguistic theory, the concept that writing is a secondary activity which invariably substitutes for the original activity, i.e., speech, that we begin to seek an isomorphism between speech and writing. It is this expectation that leads to the attempt either at predicting 'spelling' for phonetic sequences underlying words or word-sequences, or at suggesting 'pronunciation' for any sequence of graphic symbols. Whenever such a match is absent (as often happens in the case of English) we make such pronouncement as "The peculiar badness of the English [writing] system lies in the fact that it fails about equally in both"(Hill, 1967), or that English orthography is "antiquated, inconsistent and illogical" (Zachrisson, 1930). Such a view of a writing system, in turn, leads to attempts at reformation with the sole motivation of making the writing system more competent to mirror speech. What is often forgotten is that writing can reflect units which are higher than phonemes, i.e., syllables, morphemes, words or even concepts. For example, Chomsky and Halle (1968) have convincingly shown that the English spelling system is more abstract in its nature than a system with simple grapheme-phoneme correspondence.
A survey of the various writing systems that have existed at different points in human history attest this. This history of writing involves the use of successively more analytic units of language to correspond to the marks and squiggles on paper or leaf or rock. Changes in writing system have always proceeded in a particular direction and in a particular order: from the representation of ideas or meanings (semasiography) to the representation of words (logography), thence to the representation of syllables and then to the yet smaller alphabetic units of phonemes (alphabet). It will be obvious that as at each succeeding stage "the number of symbols in the script decreases, concurrently and, as a direct consequence, the abstractness of the relation between the written symbols and the meaning increases" (Gleitman and Rozin, 1977 : 3). The abstractness of relations increases at each successive stage since there are more meanings than words more words than syllables, and more syllables than speech sounds. At this point it would not be inappropriate to mention the important distinction that exists between the linguist's proposed device of a phonetic alphabet, and institutionalised writing systems which increasingly ten to refer to the meaning directly without necessarily taking a detour via the corresponding spoken utterances (Vachek, 1945-49). In the context of literacy we find tow theories: one which proposes that written language is processed only vial spoken language, and the other which claims that there is no mediation of spoken language between the written symbols and meaning. We maintain that the truth lies between these two extreme positions. While the mediation of spoken language cannot be denied at the stage of initial literacy, the extent of such mediation decreases progressively as we move towards global literacy.
What is important to remember is that writing usefully integrates a number of levels of language organization. Much of the3 controversy and misunderstanding regarding literacy and writing has arisen because of the essentially different approaches adopted by literacy experts and linguists. Literacy experts have, by and large, maintained that the skills of reading and writing involve processes much beyond letter-sound correspondence. The information-processing approach has led them to make increasing use of psychology, to the total neglect of linguistic principles. On the other hand, language experts have confined their object of inquiry to the articulacy aspect of linguacy. If they paid any attention at all, it was towards establishing units of spoken langauge which may be regarded as 'norms' for reducing language to a system of writing. Literacy experts take reading at its most global extreme, exhorting learners to grasp whole meanings without any explicit reference to the linguistic underpinning of writing systems. (This id often called the meaning oriented teaching of reading and writing.) On restrict the problem of literacy to the 'alphabetic principle'. What each set of experts overlooks in its eagerness, is that the process of reading has tow aspects: decoding 'print into meaning' and decoding it also into 'sound'. In other words, reading may be called a skill in the 'sounding out' of words, and at the same time, a skill in the 'extraction of meaning'. This may be illustrated by the English writing system which employs tow ways of representing words orthographically: phonetic and lexical. Thus, in such words as 'pill',
'kill', 'bill', 'sill' the phonetic differences between [p], [k], [b] and [s] are represented by different letters. As shown by Carol Chomsky (1970), this leads to a phonetically oriented orthography. Contrary to this, a lexically motivated spelling system makes the words in the lexicon that are related in meaning look alike in orthography. In this case, the phonetic differences of semantically related words are not represented by different letters; e.g., the vowel alteration (ay ~ i) as in 'divine-divinity' and 'collide-collision', etc., or the consonant alternation (g ~ #) in such words as 'rigour-rigid', etc., are not represented in spelling. This facilitates the identification of lexical items and the process of extracting meaning, though it does create some difficulty in the 'sounding out' of the word. Experiments have, however, shown that the reader soon overcomes this difficulty by learning to apply phonological rules concerning vowel and consonant alternations.To recapitulate then, the salient features of the relationship between speech and writing are: (a) writing encodes meaning and may, in certain cases, reflect sounds also; (b) chronologically, writing comes later than speech in the history of mankind, societies and individuals and, once institutionalised, it may gain autonomy; (c) unlike speech, writing has no biological basis; (d) writing has a greater degree of permanence than speech and transcends space and time; (e) writing serves the intellectual function (in terms of Popper's 'third world') of being the vehicle of objective knowledge; (f) writing is relatively in variant, whereas speech is inherently variable; and (g) writing has social priority in terms of prestige.
Reading as a skill therefore consists primarily of fulfilling certain types of subtasks related to the hierarchical organisation of language as a form in correct appraisal of their temporal and spatial manifestations (Srivastava, et al., 1978). It involves the following two types of factors:
(a) intervention factors which include two-dimensional activities such as (i) learning process related (mathemagenic) factors (eye movements, concentration, memory, motivation, etc.) and (ii) contextual factors (illustrations, diagrams, explanations and technical information).
(b) linguistic factors which are concerned basically with the processing skill connected with the three-stratal organisation of written language such as (i) recognition, i.e., graphemic/letter processing, (ii) structuring, i.e., morphemic/lexemic and syntactic/ syntagmatic processing, and (iii) interpretation, i.e., textual processing.
While establishing a correlation between writing and reading the following facts have to be kept in mind: (a) Reading is a linguistic experience, i.e., the reader is concerned with a significant activity related to language, rather than with communicating ideas through drawing or other modes of non-linguistic representations (Venezky, 1967). (b) Reading is concerned with the 'signe linguistique', i.e., it involves both aspects of the sign - 'signifie' (designatum) and 'signifiant' (sign vehicle). (c) Reading is act of decoding messages encoded through the visual sign vehicle, i.e., apart from identifying letters and interpretation through a mediation process. (d) Reading is not a symmetrical mirror-image of writing, i.e., whatever is true of writing is not, mutatis mutandis, true of reading as such.Reading is thus a transformation of the graphic continuum into a swquence of discrete (linguistic) units of different levels as manifestations of established linguistic forms for establishing some kind of relationship with designatum and extralinguistic reality. Despite many years of research in reading and writing, we have hardly been able to develop any coherent linguistic theory of literacy. Linguistics, as pointed out by Shuy, "has been viewed myopically as phonology, phonics or other low-level decoding levels" (Shuy, 1977 : ix), and hence, it has been viewed as merely a set of methods and techniques rather than as a content area of literacy. Time has come now that we develop a linguistic perspective for literacy, with a view to defining reading and writing as linguistic processes constituting a proper area of enquiry within a general theory of language and language use. A global linguistic perspective has to differentiate between the following three aspects of literacy:
(a) Mechanics of literacy, i.e., the ability to control the visual (graphic) medium of a language (reading and writing);
(b) Pragmatics of literacy, i.e., the ability to use a language in the written medium; and
(c) Ethnography of literacy, i.e., the ability to employ written language as a tool to achieve certain socio-cultural ends.
Literacy and Script-choiceWhile literacy in those languages which have a standardised script (a writing system) and a literary traditions, poses only problems related to curriculum-planning, literacy in non-literate languages, i.e., those languages for which no written system exists, poses another, more challenging problem - that of finding and adopting or devising a new script-system, keeping in mind the salient linguistic features of the language in question. The former solution entails sociolinguistic considerations such as appropriateness of the chosen script for the language in question, the attitudes of the speakers of the non-literate language towards the language whose script is chosen, the degree of emotional or religious or political importance of the script that is chosen, the desire for identity-maintenance (or its absence) among the members of the speech community, etc. The latter solution entails purely linguistic consideration and procedures. Whether the decision favours the adoption and adaptation of an already existing script or the creation of a new script would and should depend on the following considerations:
(a) Linguistic considerations, which demand that a writing system should be economical, consistent and unambiguous as far as possible;
(b) Psychololinguistic considerations, which require that a writing system should respect the process of reading and writing;
(c) Educational considerations, which demand that a writing system should be easy and quick to learn;
(d) Sociolinguistic considerations, which are of two sorts, internal and external: (i) internal consideration demands that the writing system should relate properly to social and regional language varieties, and (ii) external considerations demand that the writing system should relate properly to writing systems and languages in use in culturally important speech communities, as well as to other systems already in use in the community;
(e) Cultural considerations, which require that the users' attitudes should be favourable towards the writing system, and that they should consider it easy to learn and aesthetically satisfying; and
(f) Technological considerations, which require that the writing system should be pre-eminently suited to modern machine-printing, information storage, etc. (Stubbs, 1980).
Above all, one must remember the sociolinguistic principle that no matter how elegant or rigorous or systematic and regular a given writing system is, it is futile if the users (native spakers) do not like it or if they see it as a threat to their linguistic or ethnic identity. Moreover, one should also bear in mind the fact that a writing system does not exist merely as a means of transcribing (encoding sound and meaning) but also as a marker of identity of the language for which it is used and of the people who use it.
The variety of possible solution that are available in the matter of script-choice and the linguistic and sociolinguistic implications thereof can be best illustrated by taking up for discussion the multilingual and pluricultural context of India. Besides having an astonishing number of languages (both standard, literary national languages and minor languages), India has a wide variety of script systems. According to Pattanayak (1981) there are then major script systems in India: Bengali-Assamese-Manipuri, Devangari, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Kannada-Telugu, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, Perso-Arabic and Roman. While the major script systems adequately represent the major literary languages, the minority and tribal languages present a rather Complicated picture. Some languages are written in different scripts. For instance, Konkani is written in Devanagari, Kannada, Malayalam and Roman scripts; Sindhi employs two script systems and Santhali uses as many as five script systems. As opposed to this, we have instances of major script systems which are sued to represent two or more languages (e.g., Devanagari, Perso-Arabic and Raoman). In addition to the above there are several minor script systems, and new script systems are being proposed every day for linguistic, political, religious and ethnic reasons. The situations, in terms of script-choice and literacy, may be succinctly stated as follows:
1) There are ten major writing systems (with long literary traditions) which are used to represent the major regional languages, as well as some minor languages.
2) Script-language correspondence varies from cases where there is one script for one language, to cases where one script is used to represent several languages, thence, to cases where two or more scripts are used for one language and, finally, to cases where there is no script for a language.
The question of choosing or adopting a script for a non-literate language (for literacy purposes) arises because of the belief that literacy can be best initiated in the learner's mother tongue. This obviously means that whenever the learner's mother tongue happens to be a non-literate language, it has to be given a writing system. Within the Indian context, there is a variety of possible solutions to this problem. Some such alternative solutions are:
a) devising a new script for the non-literate language in question;
b) choosing a script system from amongst those which are already in use, and modifying it to suit the linguistic features of the language in question;
c) choice (b) entails decisions as to whether the script chosen should be the one used for the dominant major language of the region to which the non-literate language belongs, or if it should be the one that is used for the national official language (Hindi); another possible decision might be to use the Roman script for the non-literate language;
d) choice (a) entails decisions as to whether an entirely new set of orthographic symbols is to be created or whether symbols are to be drawn from existing script-systems and suitably modified with diacritical marks for taking care of the linguistic features of the non-literate language in question. Another decision concerns the phonetic value to be given to the symbols chosen from existing script-systems - whether a particular symbol should retain the phonetic value it has in the other language(s) for which it is used, or should it be given a new phonetic value, keeping in maid the phonemic system of the non-literate language in question.
Within the Indian context, despite voiferous advocacy of new script systems, the general tendency has been to adapt and adopt for a non-literate language the script system already in use for the dominant regional (literary) language. "Thus, the Oriya script is used for Kuvi is Dravidian). Perso-Arabic is used for Gojri. Roman is used for Ao-Naga, and so on" (Sridhar, 1982 : 223). It is obvious that once the dominant majority language of the region is chosen for literacy purposes in the mother tongue, the process of learning is facilitated, especially at a later stage of school education where the educands have to learn the dominant regional language. However, while facilitating the process of learning, such a decision is likely to be resented by the native speakers of the non-literate language on the ground that it tends to submerge their linguistic and ethnic identity. In a country where scripts and languages are often not only tokens of linguistic and ethnic identity, but also carriers of religious traditions and cultural heritage, the choice of the script system of a dominant regional language is likely to arouse hostility of these grounds too.
However, once a script system is chosen for a given non-literate language, there are serious problems, pertaining to applied linguistics, when the script system has to be suitably modified and adapted to suit the linguistic features of the non-literate language. This problem is particularly vexing when we come to the representation of suprasegmental features such as tone, length and stress. For instance, when the Roman script system was selected for Ao-Naga, it was suggested that the letters 'Q' and 'q' should be used after vowels to indicate 'high' and 'low' tone respectively. This suggestion, however, was rejected by the native literates on the grounds that it would mar the beauty of the script and make it cumbersome. Similarly, for Bodo, which uses the Devanagari script, it was suggested that the diacritics':' and ':' should be used to represent 'high' and 'low' tone respectively. Again, the suggestion was rejected on the ground that it would unnecessarily complicate the spelling system.
In dealing with such problems one has to bear in mind the theoretical requirements of maximal efficiency, economy and absence of ambiguity. At the same time, one has to remember that writing is also a tool to be used by the native literates. As such, the users' ease and aesthetic sense have also to be given due consideration, and a balance has to be struck between the demands of theory and the needs of the users.
Literacy and Language-use
In order to grasp the semantics of literacy, one must clearly understand two pairs of concepts: literacy:non-literacy and literate:uneducated. Non-literacy may be defined as the condition of a society where writing has neither been able to develop sufficiently for its meaningful use, nor has it been able to generate a value for literate culture that marginalises those who are conditioned to the life-style of an esoteric oral culture. Illiteracy, on the other hand, may be defined as the condition of "an individual or a group that has failed to master the generally accepted skills of the culture and is thus cut off from the cultural heritage of contemporaries" (Finnegan, 1972). In advanced societies literacy takes on a social form in the emergence of occupations whicn require the skills of reading and writing for their operational implementation. In such contexts, those who do not possess literacy skill can be labelled as illiterates. If an educated person is defined as one who has a critical mind, organised knowledge and skilled ability, one may say that there are many who are 'literate-uneducated' and several others who are 'illiterate-educated'. In India we have instances of many great poets and saints (like Kabirdas and Ravida) who were acknowledged reformers and educators without ever having come in contact with paper or ink.It has been said earlier that literacy involves several factors and variables. For a complete understanding of all implications of literacy, it is further necessary to bear in mind the following three aspects:
(a) Orientational: Speech is acquired in response to a language faculty with which humans are biologically endowed. Our organs of acoustic encoding and decoding are evolutionarily adapted to discharge the functions of articulation and auditory perception (Lenneberg, 1967). The same, however, is not true of the organs involved in reading and writing. In fact "reading is a comparatively new and arbitrary human ability for which specific biological adaptations do not, so far as we know, exist... the eye is not biologiclly adapted to language" (Gleitman and Rozin, 1977 : 3). The orientational aspect of literacy is concerned with all those visual and manual modalities which are involved in learning to read and write. It is concerned with the skills called 'decoding' writing into speech and 'encoding' speech into writing.
(b) Operational: This refers to the use of language in the written (visual) medium. It has very wide implications for literacy, Literacy is not merely the 'sounding out' of words or sentences; it is the skill to read with understanding and comprehension. This aspect is also concerned with the control of a variety of language which is institutionally used in the ecological setting to which writing is contextually appropriate.
(c) Functional: This refers to the ability to use written language as the instrument of one's psychological remake of 'phonetic culture', a "channel for cross-cultural communication that could serve as a bridge between oral culture and written culture' (Srivastava, 1979 : 1). It is in this context that McLuhan declared that phonetic literacy, as it has penetrated the oral-aural communities of China and India, has altered very little their world of sound. According to him, "even Russia is still profoundly oral in bias. Only gradually does literacy alter sub-structures of language and sensibility" (McLuhan, 1962 : 21).
Here we must emphasise that fact that the functional aspect of literacy does not confine itself to just acquiring the skills of reading and writing. In fact, it includes also the ability to operate in the written medium as a potential of language use. We should remember that the written mode of language, in civilised society, regulates many aspects of human behaviour and many kinds of social interaction. By not providing skills in literacy a society is, in a way, denying its members the opportunity to enter and control many spheres and vital domains of social behaviour and cultural interaction. As already stated, literacy has two aspects: (a) the ability to control the visual medium of language (reading and writing skills), and (b) the ability to use language in the written medium in all those situations to which writing is contextually appropriate. The second aspect has a much wider context. It concerns not merely the control of the medium but also control of the written variant of a language. The failure to understand a written text in Hindi can thus be due either to the fact that one is unable to control or that one is unable to control the medium in which the encoding has been done.
In order to make the distinction clear one can cite two specific situations: a situation which raises the problem of script-choice (discussed earlier) and a situation which raises the problem of language or style choice. Within India, Nagaland offers a remarkable example of the second type of situation. This region is characteristically marked for a large number of mutually unintelligible dialects. Members of different speech communities have evolved a contact pidgin for inter-dialect communication. It is this language of wider communication (completely unrelated to any of the dialects), which is being promoted for literacy programmes. This has led to a language of education and administration completely different from the language variety used in the home or village setting.
Much more than this, the choice in the matter of language/style use in literacy is concerned with the problem of semi-literacy. In the context of the massive literacy programme launched in the country recently, we have obviously relegated the problem of the semi-literates, a problem which has a lasting impact on our social structure and educational system, since they are the persons who are making our educational system dysfunctional and ineffective. In fact, the problem of semi-literacy and the semi-literates is of no less significance and of no less magnitude than the problem of illiteracy and the illiterates, as the former are the ones who are 'literate-uneducated'.
A person going to be initiated in a literacy programme already has some command over a spoken language. It is in this context that it is said that literacy persupposes articulacy. But it is quite possible that a language or style promoted by the educational system is different from the one already n use in spoken form if it is not fortuitously congruent with the mother tongue. In a multilingual and pluricultural society like ours many situational types, attesting a mismatch between language/style used orally in verbal communication and the one employed institutionally in written mode of communication can be cited. It is this mismatch which later leads to social differentiation and becomes the root of semiliteracy.
Let us consider one or two specific instances. It is generally argued that literacy is not invariably acquired in the mother tongue. As there are instances of mother tongues which have no writing system of their own, and as in multilingual and pluricultural societies these unwritten mother tongues have low status and restricted function, one may choose for literacy a language which is not the learner's own language. In all such situations, that language is selected for literacy which has a status of wider communication, for example, French in Brittany, English in Ghana or Russian for many of the minority language speakers of Soviet Union. Not so different is the case in the Hindi region of India. Literacy gets initiated with the concomitant effort of teaching the Hindi language, which has linguistically a code quite different form the codes (dialects) which their users employ in articulacy. In spite of the fact that some of its dialects are significantly rich in culture and literary tradition, the social-cum-educational pressure is such that instead of imparting literacy through the language content of these dialects, its skills are achieved through standard Hindi.
Similarly, langauge styles which exist in diglossic relationship pose another set of problems (De Silva, 1976). For example, spoken forms of Tamil language never find use in Tamil alphabet, and text book writers of Telugu invariably select a language style which is almost never used in oral communication. In such a situation the oral variety is labelled as inferior, inelegant and, at times, also incorrect and hence gets marginalised. Extreme caution is observed to maintain the venerable classical and puristic style of language for education despite the users' total inability to communicate in it. Whether it is dialect speakers making an attempt for entry into the written mode of communication, or members of a speech community in diglossic situations making an endeavour to master the socially prestigious literary style of a language, they are overburdened with extra linguistic load for a restricted usage (Srivastava, 1978). The elegant and superior variety of language or style being promoted in literacy programmes has left many learners at the level of semi-literacy - a level where a learner knows how to read and write but is unable to exploit this skill in expressing him or herself for a variety of purpose - specially in those situations to which writing is contextually appropriate.
An interesting instance of semi-literacy is the case of Indian students in English medium schools, as pointed out by Sah (1978). Despite the fact that these students are brought up in the environment of an Indian language at home and among friends, they first achieve full literacy in English. As a consequence, their literacy in the mother tongue is generally marginalised in function and usage. A language which is widely and fluently used in speech and informal situations, as well as in wide domains of social activities is thus retarded, while literacy in that language gets promoted in which their capacity as well as opportunity for use is extremely limited when compared to native speakers of English.
Viewed in the functional perspective, the conflict between the use of dialect/mother tongue vs. (standard) language gets resolved from within the literacy programme. Concerned literature on literacy raises two conflicting claims, viz.,
a) literacy as a skill is most effectively achieved in the mother tongue as literacy presupposes articulary, and
b) literacy as a function is most effectively achieved in the language of wider communication and culture.
These above mentioned claims make two conflicting demands on language use in literacy programmes, especially in our multilingual setting where mother tongues are generally neither languages of wider communication nor are they used in the ecological setting to which writing is contextually appropriate. On the other hand, most of the illiterates have command over their mother tongues (dialects) only. Especially in the village setting, they have no access to the prestigious (standard) language. In our formal educational system we impart literacy skill in the standard language from the first step of the programme itself. For example, irrespective of different dialect bases, literacy is initiated in the Hindi speaking region through primers written in standard Hindi language. This practice, first of all violates condition (a) which states that literacy is most effectively achieved in the mother tongue, and secondly, by downgrading the learners' mother tongue, it creates a gulf between literacy movement and mass participation.
We have to evolve our own literacy model, suited to yield the best result in our multilingual and pluricultural setting. Such a model proposes to initiate literacy in the language/style in which the educands have oral competence (because literacy as a skill is most effectively achieved in mother tongues). We have to bear in mind the following two dictums:
(a) Literacy is a progressively continuous process, i.e., it can be extended indefinitely within the institutional writing skill. In this context we can make a distinction between initial literacy and progressive literacy. While initial literacy is concerned with competence in the written language as distinct from writing as a medium, progressive or advanced literacy is concerned with control of the written language for a variety of pu8rposes vocational, intellectual and aesthetic. Progressive literacy is an unending process from which even the 'literates' are not free.
(b) Literacy is operationally a continuous process, i.e., it can be extended indefinitely within the institutional writing system of the mother tongue and beyond. In this context we can make a distinction between mono-literacy and bi-literacy. The fact is that literacy is acquired once. However, the way. It is possible that while learning a second language one employs either the writing system of one's own mother tongue (mono-literacy) or the writing system institutionally used for the target language (bi-literacy).
Once the educands are able to control the written medium of their mother tongue, their skill in literacy can be extended to the language of wider communication. This should not be viewed as shift-over programme. Our model for literacy should be conceived as an extension of the domain of literacy activities with functional roles allocated to the use of the written medium in respect of two codes - mother tongue (local needs and areas related to the ethnic group and its cultural heritage) and regional (standard) language (supralocal needs and areas related to abstract knowledge and scientific thought). The functionality in the use can be taken as provisional. It is quite possible that a greater role will be assigned to the written medium of the mother tongue once the school begins to provide recognition and support for it. The model proposes and competence in and control over the regional (standard) language, recognised as medium of instruction in our formal education system, without downgrading the educands' mother tongue. The advantage of this model is that the literacy programme will neither generate pressure on adult educands for learning two skills at a time - literacy (reading and writing ) skills as well as articulacy (speaking and listening) skills in a language of wider communication, nor will it stigmatise the educands' dialect. In other words, the proposal envisages the initiation of literacy in the mother tongue and a gradual transfer to the dominant, mainstream language after the at a later school stage, of the literacy skills to the mainstream language, thus opening up opportunities for the learner to enter the wider cultural world of the dominant language, as well as, have greater socio-economic opportunities. This kind of gradual transfer of literacy skills also meets the educational and psychological requirements mentioned earlier.
