JAC Volume 16 Issue 3

Within the past decade, differing attitudes concerning the causes of the decline in writing abilities have been a source of national contention among scholars, educators, and journalists nationwide. The controversy has spread from an issue once relegated to scholars and language specialists to include parents, community leaders, and policy-makers. Among these individuals, the current debate about the writing crisis ranges from questions dealing with types of classroom practices to speculations concerning cognitive learning styles. The controversy surrounding declining writing abilities particularly provokes debate among language theorists, cognitive psychologists, and educational practitioners. Some of the more lively controversies arise from those claims attempting to understand why "Rashid" or "José" cannot successfully make the transition from speaking to writing in the classroom, how writing contributes to the development of cognitive thought, and how linguistic differences produced by differences in communicative style generate cultural bias. Each of these questions has provided legitimate reason for in-depth research on the decline in writing ability, although the reality of writing in the classroom often lags some distance behind the best research on these issues.

Numerous projects addressing the issue of declining writing abilities have been initiated over the years. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has conducted several studies on student writing. After completing a comparative study of the writing produced by nine-, thirteen-, and seventeen-year olds in 1969 and again in 1974, the organization concluded that the writing of the 1974 students declined appreciably when compared to the writing of their predecessors. The latest findings of the NAEP (1994) conclude that only half of America's high school students write expository, argumentative, or narrative essays that are organized, coherent, and well developed—qualities which are essential to effective writing. The findings of the NAEP are not necessarily definitive because the term "literacy crisis" may have negative implications, for it suggests that the crisis exists primarily within lower socioeconomic minority groups and not in mainstream groups. In fact, the term has become so prevalent in the literature that it has become a code for lesser or deficient modes of cognitive functioning. Large numbers of students in American schools have been labeled in this way, but the buzz word has also become problematic for some highly educated, African American academicians who have been denied faculty positions by many white institutions because officials maintain that applicants lack the required backgrounds in specialty areas or they do not have the necessary teaching experience. John Trimbur and Richard Ohmann, for example, profess that the "literacy crisis" is a convenient linguistic expression which serves as a means of excluding African Americans and other minority populations. To address this deteriorating situation, numerous panels, commissions, and councils such as the Commission of the Humanities, the National Academy of Education, and the International Oracy Convention have been charged with the singular task of ascertaining causal explanations for the gradual yet precipitous decline in the verbal and written skills of American students. As a result of their research efforts, a complex of contributing factors have been targeted.

Some scholars attribute the decline in writing ability to the Free Speech Movement of the early sixties and seventies. Others attribute the decline to ineffective teaching methods, an overall lowering of academic standards, and the placement of inexperienced language arts teachers in urban schools. Still others point to more direct causes for the present decline in student writing performance. Three causes often cited include a diminishing seriousness about the educational process, inadequate teacher preparation, and ethnocentric attitudes. While these reasons have varying degrees of tenability, three additional developments evidenced within the macrostructure of contemporary American culture contribute even more to the crisis: the increasing dependence upon electronic media, the tremendous onslaught of culturally diverse groups appearing in today's classrooms, and the steady persistence of residual forms of communication.

Another, perhaps more persuasive explanation for the decline in student written performance in the nation's schools is the dramatic change in student population. Over the past decade there have been tremendous population increases largely coming from descendants of African, Asian, and European cultures. Demographers profess that student populations have changed with the influx of more ethnolinguistic bilingual students. For example, Frank D'Angelo states that on a national level the number of minority students is rising, that minority students will soon comprise the majority in many cities of the United States, and that the number of second language speakers in American schools is also increasing (104).

D'Angelo contends that many African American students, especially those who come from oral ethnic groups, continue to place high premiums on the folk-oral legacy. Research studies have found that if speakers are considered master storytellers, they receive high status in the community. From early ages children from oral communities learn to appreciate the value of a good story for entertainment, for capturing an audience's attention, or for competition in winning favors from adults. According to Shirley Brice Heath, in African American working-class neighborhoods such as Trackton, storytelling contests and "learning how to talk junk" are verbal devices used to establish and maintain status relations. In this community, only certain community members are considered good storytellers, and a story is recognized by the group as an assertion of group membership. Stories entertain, provide fun, laughter, and frames for other speech events which provide witty displays of verbal skills (96). Orally based language features, oral rhetorical patterns, and affective techniques, once associated with primary oral cultures, continue to predominate within some contemporary communities. A visit to the playground of any inner-city school or an evening spent in certain ethnically identifiable communities (e.g., barber shops, street corners, churches, and campuses) of any historically African American college or university reaffirms the perpetuation of culturally-based oral forms. As baffling as it may be to explain, oral continuities, retentions and survivals continue to exist.

Following those oral traditions initiated by their predecessors who possessed the extraordinary ability to perform language in dramatic fashion, large numbers of African American students have continued the folk-oral legacy. However, this persistent utilization of oral forms of communication is generally considered a serious educational problem, for presumably, it interferes with the acquisition of "acceptable" writing conventions and standard language practices. Critics claim that the phenomenon of "orality" contributes substantively to student underachievement, especially in writing, because it not only engenders a discontinuity with the demands of the school, but it is not in harmony with the academic foundations for "literate thought." Because these rhetorical carryovers are pervasive, are universal in scope, and are considered primary contributors to the perceived writing "deficiencies" of sizable numbers of America's students, this issue needs to be explored, for children from ethnic communities who continue to employ oral-style devices in their writing may be consigned to failure.

The recognized lack of proficiency in writing ability is a critical cross-cultural issue, but evidence suggests that there are disproportionate numbers of students from the African American community for whom the problem is particularly acute. At the base of the problem lies the assumption that whenever these students are required to write, they draw heavily upon Africanisms or discourse patterns associated with traditional African, Caribbean, and African American cultures. The widely held belief that students write the way they talk is a plausible one indeed, for there appears to be an implicit shift from the spoken to the written word made by speakers of African American vernaculars or vernacular dialects. Early linguistic studies conducted by researchers such as William Labov conclusively demonstrate that dialectal transference or "mixing" exists in the writing of African American students; unfortunately, such studies frequently are used as instruments or excuses for advancing discrimination along racial, ethnic, geographic, and educational lines and for reinforcing linguistic stigma. However, I want to suggest here that the lack of success in writing tasks experienced by African American students occurs because they communicate their worldviews and experiences with an oral discourse style that is incongruent with that academic writing style deemed acceptable by schools.

Research studies conducted by Ogbu, Heath, and Cook-Gumperz show that culturally different learners follow non-congruent patterns of both spoken and written language that are in opposition with those cultural and communicative practices of middle class educators and peers. The utilization of a relational cognitive style as opposed to an analytical cognitive style sharply contrasts with typical behavior of whites and contradicts standard expectations for conduct in the "analytically oriented" learning environment of the school. In addition, African American students continue to utilize a rhetorical style which they adopt from their speech community, and they employ these oral forms as a psychological tactic. By utilizing their own creative forms of language, they appear to be making conscious efforts to reaffirm their cultural identity, retain cultural ties, and display group cohesion.

Oral expression reinforces group solidarity, loyalty, and cohesion; it also serves expressive needs of individuals from the social group. By maintaining their own group-specific and group-identifying language, African American children communicate their cultural identity. These students view oral forms of expression as a functional language—one that has situational purposes within the context of the community. Functional language not only expresses the sentiments of brotherhood and sisterhood, but it also brings to mind a question frequently posed by African American students: "Why is it that we are always the ones who have to adapt to the mainstream society?"

The deployment of oral style strategies by students from the African American community does not present much of a problem in the early school grades, for the "display" of a child's communicative abilities almost always takes the form of spoken language. However, the written "display" of language competence begins to pose difficulties for older students who cannot code-switch or make the necessary structural/ linguistic transformations that are required for academic writing, especially standard expository prose. Researchers such as Stotsky contend that students who predominantly employ the oral style are not able to transform their semantically condensed inner thoughts into a communicatively effective external code. Consequently, their external codes (which, in this instance, appear as written forms of communication) are censured or penalized by language teachers for containing features or conventions that do not adhere to standard rules of written language. A common observation held by mainstream composition teachers is that students from non-African American minority groups who demonstrate a strong propensity for using oral forms of expression seem to master standard writing conventions within a relatively short period. They then question why African American students do not or cannot perform likewise. According to Gilyard, "poor reading and writing scores by Black English speakers are understood to be the direct result of these students' inability to abandon their own delimiting dialect" (70). He convincingly argues that what language educators refer to as the inability to learn standard English may quite possibly be perceived instead as an act of resistance. While linguistic loyalty and retention of oral expression connect African American students to their African past by affirming their cultural/ethnic consciousness, I believe that students from oral cultures must gain mastery of standard linguistic codes if they are to acquire proficiency in writing. How students handle the cultural transitions that occur in the acquisition of academic discourse largely affects how successfully they acquire that discourse. In short, African American student-writers, despite their attempts to maintain their culture's rich history and oral tradition, must make deliberate cognitive transformations if they are to learn to write competently.

This assumption, however, raises a red flag because one cannot leap to the conclusion that learning to write better necessarily ensures learning to think better. To date, this assumption has been promoted by developmentalists and cognitive scientists who claim that cognitive competence affects writing ability. These sweeping generalizations lead to the belief that a "competent" child has "developed" analytical ability and therefore experiences academic success while an "incompetent" child (one with oral orientations) has insufficient cognitive development and therefore experiences academic failure. The underlying message implies that students from the African American community who continue to employ oral style strategies in their writing are somehow cognitively deficient. Whether or not there is a significant correlation between the acquisition of standard language practices and achievement in writing requires further evidence, for there are many kinds of writing and many ways of shaping and communicating meaning through written words. In fact, I want to argue that a better understanding of oral forms may writing instructors gain a fuller sense of the different cognitive tasks that students are required to undertake, and despite assertions to the contrary, I want to argue that orality leads to a strengthening of literacy in the urban classroom.

If properly implemented, teachers can use orality as an important new basis for the promotion of literacy. By highlighting commonalities instead of differences, by noting situational appropriateness, and by exploiting new pedagogical possibilities, composition teachers can use this alternative manner of communication as a starting point for the teaching of writing skills. To help students bridge the gap from orality to writing, teachers must revise both the curriculum and philosophy of urban schools as they presently exist. To facilitate the bridging process, teachers must adopt fresh, and perhaps controversial, teaching techniques. To illustrate, teachers might employ materials that utilize African American folklore, cultural activities such as storytelling, oral protocols, family histories, and even "rap" music as integral parts of a comprehensive writing program. Researchers such as Geneva Smitherman point out that "styling" devices involving imagery, sound, and rhythm are potential tools for making compositions vivid, colorful, and creative.

However, before this objective can be accomplished, there must first be positive changes in teacher attitudes toward language variation. To provide the necessary instruction and leadership, teachers must become more sensitive to the cultural diversity in their classrooms, vary their teaching styles to accommodate the needs of a diverse student population, modify standard writing curricula so that they include pluralistic ethnic content, and draw upon the daily or practical life experiences relevant to and established within students' own cultures. To this end, writing teachers must use the cultural knowledge students bring to the classroom in order to provide, in the words of W.E.B. DuBois, "broad sympathy, a knowledge of the world that was and is, and of [our] relation . . . to it." When given alternative and more culturally familiar ways of responding, African American students tend to demonstrate more of what they know.

As society approaches the 21st century, urban education, especially language arts instruction, cannot be approached in traditional ways. Whether or not children become competently literate will ultimately be decided by our willingness to change. Therefore, the challenge is to the field—to continuously explore how orality and literacy can be integrated within a framework that takes into account differential modes of cognitive functioning, different cultural language experiences, and different discourse styles. In my view, research on orality should be used to improve the teaching and learning of writing, and this particularly applies to research which investigates the appropriateness of oral strategies in written language. As Farr and Janda state, "fine-grained analyses of the speech and writing of students struggling to learn to write could possibly shed light on how writing is learned, and how this learning is affected by oral communicative competence" (65). By exploiting pedagogical possibilities, writing teachers can use forms of orality as starting points for both the teaching and learning of writing skills.

Although my primary concern here has been orality in the composition classroom, there are broader implications to this discussion. Because some teachers believe that the literate discourse style is psychologically or intellectually more developed than the oral discourse style, they mistakenly assume that standard forms of expression reflect highly developed logical and cognitive skills, while assuming that to be oral is to be "less developed" or "inferior" in cognitive development. However, the existence of a different discourse style can no longer be associated with pathological modes of cognitive functioning. The trend to praise the thought forms of people who prefer a literate style and condemn those who favor an oral style is both erroneous and misleading. This ethnocentric belief system, largely encouraged by some members of the dominant sociopolitical group, equates educational success and advancement only in terms of one's mastery of a literate style. There is no question that children who tend to do poorly in school produce linguistic structures that differ from those who tend to succeed. However, until evidence to the contrary is produced, there are no cognitive consequences that result from coding experiences in one discourse style as opposed to coding it in another. According to Wright, "having the ability to speak and to write standard English (that is, to produce the structural patterns of that prescribed variety) does not generate any form of cognitive advance for the individual so privileged" (8). He argues that there is no basis for assuming that the literate style is the better style for psychological development.

As Wright asserts, differences in communicative discourse style need not imply superiority of one style over the other, but it does suggest that different sets of cognitive orientations and types of cognitive organization exist. The labeling of one communicative discourse style as "sufficient" and another as "insufficient" only indicates society's subjective attitudes and preferences, not a true indication of higher developmental processes. Such macro-community standards for language use tend to be oversimplified, for there are no strict dichotomous classifications. Individuals whose early language socialization is characterized by a predominance of orality are forced by the constraints of societal pressures to acquire competence in modes that differ from the variety which they embrace. Students select from a continuum those features which are most appropriate to achieving goals at various times in their written performances. The continuum of linguistic usage progresses from the most informal usage to the most formal. What governs a student's selection from this continuum are individual differences in the manner of thought in which the student processes, receives, and decodes information. African American students from oral communities, although versatile in a range of linguistic and cognitive competencies, show themselves to be highly sensitive to those non-mainstream linguistic features highly valued and utilized by their community. In one sense, orality represents an attempt to structure the spoken word so that it recaptures the authority it once had in primary cultures. Confronted with a renewed emphasis on oral forms vis-à-vis the proliferation of electronic media, large numbers of African American students express their worldviews and shared experiences by using remnants of oral tradition. By employing certain rhetorical patterns, these student-writers both implicitly and explicitly display a strong cultural identification and longing for an oral tradition of bygone years. Therefore, orality does not suggest less advanced forms of thinking on the part of students from the African American community. What it does suggest, however, is that ways of processing information, cultural language experiences, and cognitive preferences are simply different. Accordingly, there is a real need to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the forms and functions of differential expressive modes, particularly with respect to both spoken and written language behavior, African American communities have their own communicative discourse patterns which must be acknowledged.

Individual differences in cognitive preference is crucially important in the study of human communication, for both consistency and variability must be acknowledged in students' spoken as well as written language. As suggested here, orality is a necessary theoretical concept, for it partially explains why sizable numbers of students from ethnic/ linguistic minorities and similar oral communities cannot or do not make the transition from the spoken to the written word. More attention needs to be paid to the different mental structures or mentalities that writing generates and reveals. Continued poor performance in academic writing will remain in effect until educators recognize and accept differential modes of cognitive functioning and posit non-biased assessments about language and cognitive development. If differential treatment continues, students from the African American community will not make the transition to academic writing.

In short, lack of academic achievement, especially in writing, results more from differential treatment in formal learning contexts than from any inherent "deficiencies" or "defective" modes of cognition. This conclusion is especially important for educators who instruct African American children whose cognitive modes of functioning differ from those of the academically successful. Many educators equate the acquisition of literacy with the acquisition of higher, more abstract levels of thinking; however, they fail to realize that mastery of a written standard does not automatically indicate one's academic learning potential. Better understanding of orality will help instill a fuller sense of the different methods of cognitive organization and cognitive tasks African American students undertake as they approach the writing process. Educators must acknowledge and accept the oral discourse style as a culturally valid, unique mode of communication that can be utilized as a vehicle through which students from the African American community can make the transition from the spoken to the written word.