Page 82 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 71

Figure 5.4 Lugard Road: road sign, Hong Kong

Figure 5.5 Sign on a walking trail, The Peak, Hong Kong
come to the fore, though as the signs from Hong Kong show, these resources
were always present and used.

So what is writing?
The question of what writing is has occupied linguists for some time. The
answers have ranged from ‘writing is a transcription of speech, it is speech made
visible and permanent’ (broadly the position adopted in mainstream Western
linguistics since Bloomfield) to ‘writing is a discrete system of representation,
with its own historical origins, derived from image-based
representation’ (broadly a position such as that of Roy Harris). The answer to
this question remains crucially important, as it shapes thinking about writing,
how it is to be approached (in contemporary Britain and in the USA the
Bloomfieldian position is dominant in education, so that the learning of writing
in early years of schooling is based on ‘phonics’, which treats the sound–alphabet
relation as the key to the learning of writing). The answer is important also in that
it always reflects social issues: who is in control, what is being controlled and
what is that control being used for?
Given that, in the era of image, writing is both frequently in the context of
image, and that image is itself a ‘writing system’ in that more abstract sense,
there is a need for some discussion of the different conceptions of language and
writing deriving from the distinction between alphabetic and image-based