Integrational Linguistics - The Implications of First-order and Second-order Language On Reading Comprehension

The Implications of First-order and Second-order Language On Reading Comprehension

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (http://www.unescobkk.org/resources/online-materials/aims/uis-aims-activities/uis-aims-and-literacy-assessment/ ), literacy is defined as the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. In other words, the ability to read and write does not only to fulfill one’s own need but also to communicate with the community and society where one stays. With regard to it, this section first focuses on the distinction between spoken language (first-order language) and written language (second-order language) (Kravchenko, 2009) and how reading comprehension is achieved, and then aims at the impact of technology-enhanced interaction on reading comprehension.

Traditionally, spoken language and written language are regarded as the two sides of the same coin (Kravchenko, 2009; Linell, 2009). In other words, written language is believed to fully represent its corresponding spoken language. Therefore, educators believe by teaching words, or the symbolization of phonetic signs, students are equipped with the literacy to understand the written texts. However, it is often the case that students have a hard time understanding and interpreting a poem even though they know every single word. The glittering example reveals the problem of treating spoken language and written language as the same and implies the need to treat them differently.

According to Kravchenko (2009), spoken language and written language are different in that spoken language is temporal and local, while written language is atemporal and non-local. The understanding of spoken language relies on the common knowledge shared by the participants who are involved in the conversation, and the cognition required is situated and highly interactional. As for written language, the understanding takes place when the text is written (product) rather than is being written (process). Therefore, it is less interactional. Despite the difference, the understanding of both linguistic systems calls for the appropriate background knowledge. An example adapted from Kravchenko (2009) is that if a traveler wants to check in and the clerk tells him/her, “I’ll be back in 20 minutes”, the traveler may check the watch and calculate when to come back for the check-in, so he/she does not have to stand at the front desk for 20 minutes. However, if the traveler sees a note on the front desk saying, “I’ll be back in 20 minutes”, he/she may be baffled due to no point of reference, so he/she does not know how long is needed. This example shows that it takes more efforts to establish background knowledge for the understanding of written language than spoken language. By extension, successful reading comprehension depends upon the establishment of shared knowledge between writers and readers.

With the development of technologies, written language includes not only printed work but also hypertexts. Because of the new genres of written language, new literacy is needed. Kravchenko (2009) maintained that literacy is the knowledge of using knowledge, so students have to develop the ability of reasoning and judgment based on the written texts. Jenkins et al. (2006) go further by claiming that the form of reasoning plays a more important role than the content of learning in the era of technology-enhanced interaction. To put it another way, the content can be easily stored and retrieved by means of technologies, so the practice of reasoning centers on how to generate, evaluate, interpret, and deploy the electronic resources. Different electronic resources can provide different affordances, so one of the aims of teaching new literacy is to help students develop the ability of knowing what functions that the certain electronic resource is good at. For instance, the text mediation through computers can facilitate the thinking, reflecting, and revising of one’s own thought (Lotman, 1988; Wertsh & Biven, 1992). Videos, with the visual and auditory modality, can better help knowledge acquisition than pictures, which have the visual modality alone (Mayer, 2001).

The hypertexts available online enable readers to create their own reading paths and recontextualize the resources of websites (Baldry and Thibault, 2010). Through the recontextualization, the thematic regions and semiotic formations are more idiosyncratic than fixed. The readers play a role in picking up the meaning through the created reading paths. According to Harris (2010), linguistic signs should be understood with non-verbal activities. In addition to reading the hypertexts, the readers have access to other non-textual resources online, such as pictures, diagrams, videos, etc. The use of those non-verbal semiotic resources within the texts has its function and offers affordances to the readers to make meaning (Baldry and Thibault, 2010).