by Michael Jaffe 

Of course, literacy entails more than the ability to phonetically recognize strings of alphanumerics and to commit symbolic references, through pen or keyboard, outside of our heads.  Comprehension, acquired through processes of social interaction, is implicit in the value of reading and writing.  Phonemes, words, and phrases acquire their meaning for individuals through their use.  A working understanding of a language's grammar as it is used in a society is fundamental for being able to process and generate the words we speak, read, and write.  As such, I would propose a better definition of "literacy"--the degree to which one can understand and convey the content of information in social environments.

Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological processes involved in the development and use of language; anthropology is the study of cultures; and, cognitive science seeks to identify, and to some degree re-engineer, the agencies of intelligence.  Based on the contribution of  these fields, we believe that our species has survived as long as it has because of its ability to reinvent itself through language.  Because we did it in the right way, at the right time, homosapien survived when our Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal cousins did not.  It is the ability to cultivate and perpetuate our legacy and literacy that makes us viable and adaptive creatures.

Forty-five years ago, Noam Chomsky proposed that we think of language not as a specific system of shared symbols and the rules which recombine them, but rather as a capability to acquire the rules of such systems. Through our language capability we acquire grammars, the guiding rules which help us share our ideas symbolically.  Many of us, perhaps even those of us who teach the subject, often think of grammar as artificially dry categories of rules and pedantic dictates of how we should commonly use language.  But language capability enables us to acquire internal grammars years before we've “cracked” our first-grade grammar books. We begin learning grammar from our very first interpersonal interactions, usually starting with our mothers. By the time we are four years old, our internal grammars have largely taken root, and from then on influence the way thoughts are formed, recognized, and expressed.

Our language capability is interconnected to reasoning agencies to such an extent that it can be difficult to distinguish between internal thought and communication processes.  Indeed, many hold that thought is really communication in our heads which makes us remember combinations of feelings aroused from personal histories.  The seminal works of developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky have presented compelling support for the theory that language and reasoning develop together.  Sociolinguist Benjamin Whorf theorized that the linguistic characteristics of different cultures directly influence cultural differences in reasoning and ontology.  In other words, grammar “in the head” is very likely the conceptual foundation of logic and abstract thought.

Grammars “outside of the head”, the kind we teach and learn in school, provide a common set of linguistic communication tools.  Any understanding of the concept of literacy must, therefore, consider grammars - not the kind we "should" use, but rather the kind we "do" use.  The social rules of grammar are not static, despite our best efforts at preserving what Britons would call the Queen's English,  what is generally considered "good grammar."  A social balance exists between the forces that seek to keep linguistic grammars stable and those which modify grammars to accommodate social changes:  Slang finds its way into the officiallexicon; expressions are borrowed across cultures; new forms of nonverbal emphasis develop; and new creoles and pidgins arise from older, "established" tongues. Changes in the way we individually, socially, and culturally process information are matched by  changing grammars and, in the larger sense, our conceptions of literacy.

Over the course of thousands of years, pictograms and hieroglyphics developed into phonemic symbols, the letters of our alphabets. Their broad applicability and economy depend, in part, upon their limited number of standard symbols and their  absence of exclusive semantic associations.  On the other hand, rich expression via text usually requires a large volume of verbiage.  However, the emergence of computer-mediated communication, the Internet in particular, has introduced some new elements into the mix. Our society utilizes ever more sophisticated electronic mechanisms to support and enhance memory, thought, and communication.  To this end, the meaning of documentation, and the language we use to record and share information content, have changed with the advent of silicon-based logic, digital encoding, and hypermedia.  Limiting our notion of literacy to alphanumeric paper technology would seem to be a ridiculously narrow conceptualization. Literacy for the twenty-first century might well be characterized as “one step backward, two steps forward."  Joshua Meyerowitz suggests that we are living in an anthropotropic era of human communication technology in which we are “rehumanizing” our symbols of discourse.  The backward step  involves the reintroduction of communication using pictures, gestures, and voices, human communication modes which were used before text enabled us to transcend barriers of time and space.  The forward step includes our more recently acquired capacity to send messages “anytime, anyplace”  through the Internet,  a degree of built-in-intelligence in hypermedia documents, and the capability of combining different media formats--of text, audio, and video--into one document.  From a psycholinguistic perspective, the social acceptance of these communication technologies might well be changing the way we think and, as  such, might  be changing our social grammars.

What might all this mean for language educators?  On the face of it, new pedagogies would be in order to help cultivate a new literacy which reflects new aspects of social thought.  A characteristic of any new media is that it provides multimedia authoring capabilities.  The spread of the Internet in the home has, among other developments, led to the trend of children using electronic mail, seeking information through search engines, and even building their own web sites.  These activities can be co-opted into exercises which teach linguistic and grammatical reasoning skills.  While teachers should certainly not be expected to become technical gurus, hackers, and webmasters, they should at least be aware of new forms of expression, their common uses, and the expressive opportunities they present.  They don't necessarily have to become "athletes" themselves in order to be effective "coaches."  At another level, teachers can act as facilitators, helping their students to bridge contexts of discourse, from computer-mediated communication to more  traditional modes of writing and speech.  In short, as it exercises the link between language and reasoning, cyberspace can be a fertile ground for language instruction perceived by the student as relevant and vital.