The child’s engagement with print reveals a complexity in the medium of ‘print’ which has gone unrecognized and unremarked. Instead there has been a focus on the quite abstract idea of ‘language’, or on ‘writing’, in most theoretical (and political) debate, as though there could be such a thing as language independently of its material appearance, whether in sound or in print. If much, perhaps most, of the complexity of the system of writing goes unrecognized, it is not surprising that modes of teaching may not be able to help all those who have particularly marked problems. Of course, as I said earlier, most children manage to find their way into and through the perceptual and conceptual maze of print, only for some to give up later for a variety of cultural and social reasons. But all of them might find the whole process much easier if the complexity of their task was understood by those whose job it is to know—academics, ‘educationalists’—planners, policymakers, teachers, and yes, politicians.
Children make signs and read them out of their interest, and make signs which reflect the meanings they want to convey in the form and the substance of the sign. They make signs which are founded on a motivated relation between meaning and form, signified and signifier. That is the overriding principle with which they approach the world of alphabetic writing. And then they come up against the brick wall of a system which in a number of ways and at a number of levels resists an understanding in those terms. There simply is no reason, no ‘motivation’, for a shape such as E expressing the sound of e as in Emily. No one’s interest is expressed in that particular relation. At this point the child’s logic does not work. Nor does it seem to work when she or he seeks to understand how or why crocodile, or car, or any word means the things they do mean.
Because we are dealing with cultural systems of very ancient histories, the step, the connection, the principle is not easy to see, not immediately graspable. We are dealing with cultural materials which have accreted around them layers and layers of meaning, and these richly meaning-endowed objects form the substance out of which we make new meanings, by the processes of metaphor. When an English speaker asks for a light bulb in a shop, or screws it into a lamp, she or he does not remember or remind themselves that the word bulb is a metaphor, made quite some time ago, using an existing word, encrusted with its meaning (spring bulbs, onion bulbs) to act as the vehicle for a new meaning, that of the glass and metal object fashioned by a new technology. Once pointed out, the metaphor is of course visible: the motivated character of that sign becomes apparent—as it is with the German Glühbirne, except that here the word for a fruit, the pear (‘glowing pear’), was used as the vehicle for the new meaning. Both are motivated signs; clearly not arbitrary, even if the ‘vehicle’ for the new meaning was a different one in each case.
Children try to persist with their logic, and with their principle, and in the process they reveal more of the complexities of the medium of written language. The question, as with the images, texts and objects discussed in the earlier chapters, is: what do the children see; what do they regard as central; what are they interested in representing? Looking at the things they produce as a result of looking at print, leads me to say that unlike adults— whether linguists or educators—children see complex objects, and not ‘just language’. In fact they constantly switch focus; they change their point of view; and in that process they ‘see’ different things, ‘print’ takes on different forms. It is these different things I will now examine, in order to discover what children think this
thing ‘printed language’ or ‘writing’ is, and the manner in which they may make sense of it.
All of the kinds of things considered here are entirely usual products of children in the course of their move into writing. The first of these is Figure 4.2. It is this which made me think that the child is focused on print, rather than on writing. Compare this Soon everyone in Pontypandy was outlooking for Rosa. But there was no sign of her. with Figure 4.3, a caption from a page of a Fireman Sam book. The one-and-a-half lines of print take up about a thirtieth of the page, the majority of which is given over to a coloured picture. That discrepancy must be puzzling to a child: why is it that adults pay so little attention to this huge part of the page, and so much attention to this tiny part of the page? That in itself makes print intriguing—it must be important if so much is made of so little! It is not unreasonable to think that the child is imitating precisely the object ‘lines of print’. As a visual object, the one-and-a-half lines do have the appearance of the child’s drawing: elements of a similar kind, running together, across the page, with some more of the same underneath. A painter who was asked to draw the Fireman Sam page as an object in the background of a bigger picture might represent the print in quite the same way.
Focus on writing produces an object, ‘line of print’ or ‘block of print’, in the child’s reading. It does not provide an answer to the question of what it is, for the child, other than ‘parents treat it as by far the most important bit of the page, they “read” it, it makes meaning’. That is a complex and important meaning, and provides another stepping stone on the path into print. Children produce other analogues and forms: the headlines of the ‘newspaper’ (Figure 3.6) are an example; here the child had ‘read’ those elements on the page which have significant bold letters, as a noteworthy object, and represented them.
There are many other perspectives on print. Figure 4.4 shows a common set of forms, where the child is practising, it seems, the shape of particular letters. Over the page I have put together a few examples.
While in the Figures 4.2, 3.6 and 4.1 the child’s focus seems to have been on a whole, larger unit: ‘line of print’, ‘headline’, ‘my name’, now there is a new focus, namely on the constituent Figure 4.2 Writing as a ‘block of letters’: ‘doing my work writing’
element and its shape. Or perhaps it is still the line of print, but now with a focus on the individual elements in the line of print, showing both the shape of elements and ‘regularity’ as a feature of writing.
A sideways glance at a child writing ‘numbers’ may be instructive in the search for understanding their view of and perspective on writing. Figure 4.5 shows ‘numbers’ written by a 4½-year-old girl, about 6 months after she had drawn the letters in Figure 4.4.
There seems to be a difference in shape for all these numbers (which had been written on separate scraps of paper initially) compared to the shape she uses for letters. Whether she has, at this stage, a sense of the difference between letter and number is hard to say, though the shapes shown here may mean that she is sensitive to a difference in the characteristics of the shapes.
Yet another ‘take’ on writing is shown in the example of the newspaper in Figure 3.6. This is a focus on the medium. In the (4½-year-old) child’s example several things seem to emerge from her reading: newspapers have (sensationalist) news, the caption (as read by the girl) was ‘In John Prince’s Street someone got dead’; they have images; and they stand in the relation of headlines (and other writing) at the top, and image at the bottom. ‘Headlines’ are in big bold letters. Other captions, on other examples of newspapers drawn at the same time, are: ‘They were having a conference in America’ and There was a burglar broke into somebody’s window’.
Figure 4.3 Fireman Sam caption
Source: Alison Boyle, Fireman Sam and the Flood, London: Heineman,
1990.
Her then 7-year-old brother’s newspapers are more developed. Where her paper is made on a single sheet, he has folded the same-sized sheet, so that his papers have a front page, and inside pages. One of the front pages (not shown here) has an emblem, a picture of the sun, and is called The Sun. Its bold headline is TheBig Day. The two inside pages are divided between ‘New’s’ as its heading says (the right-hand page, page three so to speak) and sport, with its heading The mach of the day’ (Figure 4.6).
Clearly, this child’s reading is guided by his interest. ‘News’ is defined, as in his sister’s paper, by its sensationalist or violent character. Sport, in the form of soccer, is the other factor that his reading and his production focuses on.
As well as a focus on the medium (the ‘mass media’) in their different ways, there is clear evidence also of a beginning focus on the generic organization of written materials, by content (‘News’, ‘Sport’) as much as by a beginning awareness of formal generic differentiation. The girl’s ‘In John Prince’s Street someone got dead’ was spoken in a ‘newsreader’ tone of voice. The boy’s ‘arplane cashas’ is headlinese. One newspaper produced by him a year and a half earlier has this dictated text ‘Someone is hanging out so much washing. Do you know who it is? If you find her/him call— [and then his phone number].’ Below that is a drawing of a lot of washing flapping wildly on a line. Another which was also done at that time has this heading: ‘Good news just in’ (spelled ‘God nes Figure 4.5 ‘Numbers’
just in’) over a drawing of a giant strawberry, and below that ‘Giant Strawberry’.
In the multiple readings which children perform, the different ‘takes’ they have, looking at print now this way and now that, now as ‘block of print’, now as ‘letter’, now as ‘sequence of letters’, now as ‘newspaper as object’, now as ‘newspaper as message’, now as ‘text as genre’, children gradually develop a sense of what this ‘stuff is. Each new focus, each ‘take’, each perspective, reveals print as a different object; and each of their readings produces a differently motivated sign. All of these are real enough aspects of writing/ print. ‘Block of print’ is one aspect of print/writing; so are individual letters; so are the media which the children discern. Their principle of making (and reading for) motivated signs works on each occasion. As I tried to show in the discussion of the Figure 4.6 Newspaper: The mach [sic] of the day’
child’s name, what we as adults take (too naively) as simply print or writing or language, is an enormously complex phenomenon. Children treat it as such, and uncover this complexity bit by bit. Print/writing is ‘multisemiotic’, in that it uses a multiplicity of semiotic means all at one time. Children have to unpick this multiplicity bit by bit. It is a process that takes years. The writing of the name traces a continuous analytic engagement over a period of thirteen months—but it had started before that, and it continued after my last example. The examples that I have range over many years, in the case of Michael’s newspapers up to the age of 8. The analytic, transformative engagement isn’t finished then. The paths into writing are many, enormously complex, and long. It is the adult’s simplistic view which obscures this.
All of these many paths start unobtrusively, hardly noticeable at first. The path into generic form has already begun when the 4- year-old girl makes her newspaper. It is much more clearly formed by the age of 8; although it is the transition from primary school to secondary school which marks a crucial stage here: secondary school clearly requires generic writing in specific disciplines. But we can see an increasing focus on generic form all along that path. There are ‘listings of items for sale’ (much like the listings recognizable from certain forms of junk mail); there are recipes; there are cards; invitations; tickets for admission to plays; and of course, there are many stories, and many narratives.
Here are some examples of these texts: first a list from a shop. Items are written underneath each other, as in the original.
SHOP
bage’s 1 (badges) Palasmat’s 10p (placemats) 10p 2 paperarpans (paper aprons)
kron 10p (crown) 2p pad’s (pads) rocete’s (rockets) saf’s 10p (scarves) 10p neclse (necklace) washas 10p (washers) racdaer 2p (recorder) 10p monser (monster) Paper Patnan (pattern)
This list was posted up, as part of a game of playing shops; the goods were all made by the two shopkeepers.
Here is a ‘lunch list’ made by Michael, (age six years and three months)
Lunch list for Michael
Matad chese and tmotew and bacn ol on a biscat into the coca te mac a piser. and da tric of cold tholt.
This was a request for ‘lunch next Saturday’; he read it back to me as ‘melted cheese and tomato and bacon all on a biscuit in the cooker to make a pizza. And a drink of cold chocolate.’
In his reading back he instructed me to ‘make a full stop there’, where it is above, and where in fact he had placed it himself in his own written version. In other words, a part of his attention towards writing now includes ‘punctuation’; this is also indicated by his lavish use of the apostrophe in the shop list just above.
Here are two stories, both illustrated. The first, The bii and the rinocsrs’ (The bee and the rhinoceros) is produced as a book of six pages.
The bii and the rinocsrs. [Title page]
Oaes a pon tim their wos a bii and a rnacrs.
[Pages 2 and 3; the text is on page 3, page 2 has a drawing of a bee in the top half—more or less opposite the word bii—, and a drawing of a rhinoceros in the bottom half of the page]
Won day the rinosrs met a bii.
[Pages 4 and 5; again drawing of bee and rhinoceros on the facing page, 4]
And the bii sdg hem sow the rinosrs poct the bii. And thats The End.
[Page 6]
This book moves from the ‘back page’ forward; that is, its directionality is the opposite of western convention; the writing itself is from left to right.
The second story is ‘The roadrunner’ (my title). This is written as a story on a page; with the story more or less across the top of the page, and the illustration more or less across the bottom of the page. ‘Once upon a time a roadrunner lived. The roadrunner was chased by coyote. Coyote was dumb but he thought he was clever. He called himself a genius because he made so many traps. But
roadrunner ran through his traps.’ This is my transliteration made from his reading of the story to me. The original was written something like this (I say ‘something like’ as it is not the neatest writing in the original—a point to contemplate in itself in the question of writing as a medium of transcription: writing may be too slow or cumbersome for the child’s needs in telling a story).
ensc apon atam a rodraunar lad the rodranauar was shast bi e cioti
the cioti was damb bat he thot he was cava. He coot hersalf a genas.
Be cas he ma soman trrapps. But radranur ran thaw hes traps.
The child read the story to me (it was written on the 26 December), on the 5 January, when I transcribed it (making the note that himself was read as he:self); he had read it to me also on the previous night, and three days prior to that, that is, on the 1 January each time in the same form. I make that point because there seems some uncertainty generally about the extent to which these early forms are reliably written, or are simply more or less serviceable mnemonics for the child. I assume that there is a slow development in this, but that by this stage these forms represent accurate transliterations of sound into graphic form. In a sense this is the end of drawing: it is the beginning of real writing.
But having said ‘in a sense’ I want to hedge this statement even more. I think that this represents yet another, a crucial point in the observation and analysis of print/writing from so many foci, so many perspectives: the crucial point where the letters are drawings of sounds. Now the graphic form letter is used to carry the meaning of (a particular kind of) sound. This shift, like all the metaphors that I have traced, is of great complexity and cognitive subtlety: a visual form is linked to a sound meaning. It is the linking of two fundamentally different media: of sight and sound; that of the spatially expressed and that of the temporally expressed.
Throughout this long process as I have presented it here, a period of at least four years, the child applies the idea of the motivated relation of form and meaning. In this process, ‘meaning’ has very many very different guises, as I have tried to show. The signs children make, in ‘writing’ as in ‘reading’, are expressions of their interest; it applies to their drawing, their making of objects, and their engagement with print. In this they act like all makers of signs, children as much as adult.
DRAWING IDEAS, OR DRAWING SOUNDS:THE