In my brief description of literacy just now I deliberately adopted an order that went from text to letter, from a large unit to a small unit, from a unit which is directly governed by larger social factors to a unit in which that influence is present but perhaps a little less directly visible. I did that for two reasons: one is to go against one common-sense view of language, which might be called the bricks-and-mortar view, or the building-blocks view of language. That is a view which says that language has small units, sounds, which make up larger units, words, which make up larger units, phrases, which make up clauses, which make up sentences, which make up texts. (The theorist’s version of this would be somewhat more complicated, but there are versions that are quite close to this.) As a theory of how we actually use language it obviously doesn’t hold water, though that has not led to its demise.
The building-blocks view also corresponds in no way at all, and this is my second reason, to children’s production of their sign/ messages, whether small or large, simple or highly complex. Children’s designs unfold in much more complex and much more subtle ways—and when one attempts to retrace the path of their sign-making one can only come to one conclusion: it is planned in
very many instances in great detail; it shows all the features of design; it is done with full intent. The example of the ‘Panadol- man’ was one instance; here I want to give another, to foreground the issue of the child’s planning and design of complex semiotic objects: complex both in their cognitive/conceptual content, and in their management of several different modes in the making of one sign. My new example is as follows.
Emily, at that stage 6 years old, had noticed that her brother had fashioned a shield out of a rectangular piece of cardboard, about 1 m long, and 35 cm wide. She asked if she could have a similar piece of cardboard. When I next saw it it had been transformed into a screen and movie, propped up on two pillows, below a light in the living room. When the curtain was drawn and the lights went on, a pillow which had hidden the central section was removed, to reveal the ‘movie’: a large chocolate egg on the left, a small chicken on the left; two clouds with faces above; the sun in the top right corner. The chicken was conducting (the voices emanating from behind the screen) a verbal exchange with the sun. Sun: ‘A happy day’; chicken: ‘No’. One of the clouds commented ‘What is that’ in reaction to a bolt of lightning nearby (one of two, one near each cloud). In the bottom right corner, a cut-out white paper boat nearly covered a blue lake. On the top left margin there is a printed ‘BBC 15’, which was announced as ‘BBC Channel 15’ (Figure 6.1).
While I do not know the degree to which this design was fully planned, in all detail, it is clear that when Emily asked for the cardboard—which she had encountered as a shield, made by her brother—she knew what she wanted to make. This whole ‘production’ process, including the ‘staging’ and narration, is, if we are prepared to treat it seriously, in every way as complex a task as any form of writing. In my estimation it is a more complex task. Some process of prior internal representation has to precede the execution of the design. Often, as in the case of the Panadol-man, and as here, the process starts somewhere in the middle, so to speak; and certainly it is not a process of gradual ‘building up’, going from small or large, or from simple to complex. It has much more a feeling of the child’s sense of a whole design from the beginning, as a kind of Gestalt.
In fact, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked the movie producer what made her do it. She said ‘I wanted to do a show, and I thought about what season was coming up, and so I made the Easter egg, and an Easter show. If I had thought about your birthday, I would have made a birthday show.’ This was said at the end of January. Show is an established genre in her and her
friends’ repertoire. Movie might have been introduced because the previous day she had been to see the film Babe, which may or may not have had an effect.
The point of introducing the concept of design is to draw attention to these factors, which go by unnoticed, even in considerations of play, and of games. And that is significant in order to dispel a naive but persistent view of meaning-making. This is that when I speak I wish to express a meaning; which I encode in a word (which more or less ‘fits’ my meaning), and on uttering that word—or a string of words—my meaning gets across to the person to whom I am speaking. But when the two girls playing their game came to a point where they needed a car, there wasn’t the object-equivalent of a car, or even more importantly, the equivalent of the car which they needed, around. In the three- dimensional multisemiotic world of objects there are no ‘words’. So they had to make a car, one which suited their needs. They constructed it on the basis of a design which existed well before the drawers were removed from the chest of drawers to serve as the foundation for the central seat and the doors of the car. It existed as a clear design: it included a sense of what materials would be used; to fulfil what function; a selection of other materials from what was available; all before the first object was placed on the floor.
The realization that there are no ready-made tokens, no ‘words’, to carry our meanings in these modes, should make us more serious in our regard of these objects; to consider the processes of design seriously—and the implication of that decision for our view of childish semiosis and cognition. It might also make us somewhat more sceptical towards currently accepted notions of language, and of our making of meaning in language. They look seductively like that; and in theory as in common sense they have been treated like that. The four cars which I mention in Chapter 2 are all fundamentally different from each other—and they are made to express those differences. In language they are represented by the single word car. Words are not, in my view, ready-made objects or tokens of meaning, which we can simply insert into the chess game of our social interactions. Words are materials out of which we can fashion new signs; and these new signs express our meanings. That shift in thinking suggests that the notion of design applies to verbal text also; it could be useful to explore the consequences of using it in our approach to children’s (and adults’) verbal texts.
STRUCTURES AND MEANINGS OF