Whole language as signifier: Considering the semantic field of school literacy

Journal of Literacy Research, Mar 1998 by Dressman, Mark, McCarty, Laurie, Benson, Jonathan

As a sign system, language has the interesting property of being both unmotivated and arbitrary ... and motivated.... It is unmotivated and arbitrary from the point of view of its properties as a formal, abstract system. It is motivated from the point of view of the meaningfulness and appropriateness that individuals feel about their language as it is used in actual social and cultural contexts. (p. 296)

In other words, although linguistic categories do anchor people's realities, everyday circumstances also require that people use those categories in response to changing social contexts in ways that enable them to maintain or enhance their own social standing and efficacy within a culture through the discursive use of language, a process that results in a gradual shifting of language-driven meanings and perceptions. As Sherzer put it:

It is discourse which creates, recreates, modifies, and fine-tunes both culture and language and their intersection, and it is especially in verbal artistic discourse such as poetry, magic, verbal dueling, and political rhetoric that the potentials and resources provided by grammar, as well as cultural meanings and symbols, are exploited to the fullest and the essence of language-culture relationships becomes salient. (p. 296) The significance of Sherzer's approach for our analysis of as a discourse has been threefold. First, Sherzer's update of Sapir-Whorf has impressed upon us the importance of linguistic categories as our primary object of analysis, if it is through such categories and the terms they contain that patterns of cultural belief are encoded and practices are enacted. In practical terms for us, this has meant comparing and contrasting among different "voices" and different representative groups the descriptive words and phrases used to denote as well as the more connotative descriptive words and phrases used in conjunction with the term - words by which the "secondary implications" (Lyons, 1977) of the term as a sign are negotiated within the community. Within each representative group (e.g., all elementary teachers), we listened to each tape and recorded specific descriptors used by the interviewee to describe what was and what it was not to that interviewee. Some individuals' uses of specific terms within each group seemed to "clump," or cluster, together; for example, one group of teachers described as "developmental" and downplayed any focus on "skills," whereas another group used terms like "integrated" and "intertwined," and talked about "skills in context." The fact that interviewees within a specific clustered set also identified themselves as belonging to common social groups (e.g., teachers generally either taught at the same schools or shared membership in the same professional groups - e.g., Phi Delta Kappa and Teachers Applying Whole Language [ TAWL] ), and moreover that the commonality of descriptors used by individuals across groups (e.g., between principals and teachers, or between Algodon State faculty and principals) also coincided with shared professional associations, warrants our basic argument that these descriptors are a crucial part of the discourses circulating within El Campo-Algodon State about education in general, and particularly about school literacy- discourses that apparently have contributed to principals' retirements and reassignments within the last 5 years, to teachers' transfers, and to some strain in relations between local schools and Algodon State.