Page 158 - Literacy in the New Media Age

READING AS SEMIOSIS 147

and for both it was a word they had not encountered before. Neither of them has
a difficulty in constructing some phonological/morphological entity, and to
transliterate that from a spoken and heard form to a graphological/written form.
At that level there is no problem. The problem arises at the level of meaning,
and it is solved by each of them in distinctly different ways. James (‘frogs born’)
draws on the semantic resources in the materials provided for him by the teacher
(teacher’s talk, images, talk with his neighbour). ‘This is about reproduction’, he
seems to say to himself, ‘so obviously this unknown word must be “born”’. The
resultant reading, the linguistic entity ‘frogs born’ has no syntactic status. A
reader of his reading will need to do work to make it grammatical: supplying an
assumed elided ‘are’, to give ‘frogs are born’, for instance. Emily, by contrast,
draws on syntactic resources available to her. These do not (necessarily) come
from the classroom. They are the resources drawn from her experience of
language more widely: ‘ah’, she seems to say to herself, ‘I have come across
forms like this before, “mum’s bag”, for instance, or “my brother’s Playstation”.
This must be another one like it. I don’t know what a “sporn” is, but that’s not
unusual; so many new words, every day’.
With this last example I have moved to the border between reading of script
and reading considered much more widely. I have also moved into the discussion
of reading as a process that relates to multimodally constituted texts. James had
drawn an image of ‘frogs born’ – and the image shows clearly that he knows
‘what he is talking about’. We need to see the overall meaning of his text as a
composite of the written and the drawn elements. In meaning, they have a
partially overlapping and a partially complementary function in relation to each
other.
However, to get a full sense of what is involved in the process of reading I
will take another example, which embeds ‘reading’ much more widely in the
lifeworld of the reader – and of course of the writer too. My example, Figure 9.5
(overleaf), is familiar to everyone. Here it is the horoscope from a giveaway
newspaper, for 19 January 2002. The text, as I say, is commonplace, innocuous;
and ‘readable’, in a full sense, only in the contexts of the life-worlds of the
readers who attend to this type of text. (Of course we know that many readers of
the paper ‘look at’ the horoscope, or make fun of this kind of text – and many
more do not even do that – but they are, by definition, not really readers of the
text.)
Of course, there is no particular problem here in terms of linguistic complexity
– always provided that the reader has a relatively full competence in English.
There are ‘culturally specific’ issues such as the idioms – in the sign of
Capricorn – ‘giving the girl a good send-off’, ‘if you get my drift’ or – in the sign
of Pisces – ‘the heat is … off’, ‘sit back and take it easy’, ‘come back to earth’.
And there are some more specifically cultural matters such as – in Capricorn – ‘all
things Venusian’ or – in Pisces – ‘Mars leaves’; though now ‘cultural’ has
changed to mean ‘those in that group which knows about the attributes of the
gods Venus and Mars in classical mythology’.