Literacy, Language and Learning:The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing

Front Cover
David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, Angela Hildyard
CUP Archive, Apr 26, 1985 - Education - 438 pages
Literacy is an important concern of contemporary societies. This book offers a comprehensive survey of recent efforts to understand the nature of written language and its role in cognition and in social and intellectual life. The authors represent a wide range of disciplines - cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, education, history and philosophy - and address a wide range of questions. Is literacy a decisive factor in historical and cultural change? Does it alter the mental and social lives of individuals? If so how and via what mechanisms? Does learning to read and write change children's speech, thought or orientation to language? What are children and adults learning when they acquire literate skills? Are there differences - linguistic, psychological and functional - between speaking and writing? And are there differences between oral and written languages?
 

Contents

Introduction
1
On the printing press as an agent of change
19
The concept of literacy in print and film
50
Linguistic differences produced by differences
105
Relative focus on involvement in oral and written
124
Are there really no primitive languages?
148
universal and culturespecific
167
creating worlds or shunting
195
Oralwritten differences in the production and recall
285
Development of dialectical processes in composition
307
Effects of printed language acquisition on speech
333
Interactions between spelling and sound in literacy
368
some
389
Phonology in reading
404
an annotated
412
Subject index
427

a psychogenetic perspective
217
Preschool literacyrelated activities and success
229
Oral and literate competencies in the early school
256

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information