Final Exam- Strong Text vs Process View/Convergence Literacy/Aurality and Multimodal composing

Humaira Zakaria
Professor Gleason
ENGL B6400
December 9, 2009
Final Exam

Strong-Text View of Literacy vs. A Process View of Literacy

Strong-text is written text, and our literacy is dependant of our involvement and coping skills with text. According to Deborah Brandt “literacy is culturally dependant on the invention and continued existence of the technology of text” (13). Literacy is shaped around social and cognitive relationships, but strong text is based on the relationship we have with actual writing. Brandt states that “people become literate by coming to terms with the unique demands of alphabetic writing, a technology that forces radical interpretive shifts away from oral discourse habits” (13).
This view of literacy however is different than the processing of literacy. With strong text it entails “ a suppression of ordinary social involvement as the basis of interpretation and a reinvestment in the logical, literal, message- focused conventions of language-on-its-own” (Brandt 13). From the process perspective “social involvement appears as a fundamental basis of orientation during the tenuous enterprises of writing and reading” (Brandt 13-14) which means that literacy isn’t only involved with a person’s ability to deal with text but also the “ability to deal with other people as a writer or a reader” (Brandt 14). Strong text is specifically referred to written text because print is unchanging and fixed onto a media.
Written language can stand alone, because “it exists, as inscription, independently from the physical presence and even living existence of its author” (Brandt 23). Text will outlive the author who had written the passages, for years and years on end, and will
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surpass any of its readers. Language through strong text is able to be preserved. Due to this “written language comes to have its own status in the social context” (Brandt 23). Because written text is fixed, the grammar and syntax are stabilized and conventionalize meaning, “structure becomes meaning” (Brandt 23). Written language will always mean the same thing throughout time, regardless of where and who reads it.
The autonomy of written text leads to the anonymity of strong-text. Since text can stand alone, it does not matter as much who the author is. Strong-text “comes with the liberation of language from breath also brings liberation from the restricted capacity of oral speech merely to express or signal, that is, to remain affiliated with the speaker” (Brandt 24). Oral communication is based between speaker and listener, a social process. Meaning of the context of speech may shift between the speaker and listener or be completely forgotten in a short amount of time. Even so, text and social acts of language cannot be separated from each other. Strong-text sets the standards of literacy, while social acts help us develop our understanding to adhere to the standards that were set by strong-text.
Literacy is based on the simple idea that one knows how to read and write. Reading sets the standard through strong-text and writing can be used as a representation of one’s literacy. But instead of focusing on the final written product, Brandt believes that literacy should be based on the process of writing rather than the final product. Writing is a process, in where people write several drafts and make revisions leading to the final product because there is a cognitive process theory of writing “that depicts writing as a goal-directed and highly dynamic thinking process consisting of recursive cycles of
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planning, drafting, and reviewing” (Brandt 33).
This process “treats the individual, isolated writer as the originator of goals and plans for writing,“ but the writer fails to link the structures that they develop mentally for their written work to the wider discourse of community or even to the public language” (Brandt 34). By recognizing and understanding the writer’s process of writing “requires a wider view of both writers’ social identities and the cultural resources and constraints that they contend with” (Brandt 34).
By focusing on the process view of literacy it requires the “growing ability to see a kind of double meaning in written language: and ability to see not merely what a text is saying but what it is saying about you… what is saying about what you need to be doing next as a writer or a reader” (Brandt 35). Expert writers can make the distinction of this ability for metacommunicative meaning while weaker writers completely miss this.
Instead of reading text and finding meaning (strong-text approach), individuals need to also know how to develop a process so that they are also creating context. People who are considered skilled readers and writers “pull together and maintain situated meaning… writers make the decisions that keep writing going” (Brandt 38). By being a strong writer, one can make the necessary adjustments to continue the process that leads to the final work. Writing is not just for the writer, once the text is written or typed on a form of media (paper or digital), the writing becomes a shared experience for others to make meaning out of.
The development of the writing process to be shared
“plays a central role is making and maintaining context… writers and
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readers do not have to keep a whole process going, they have to understand how textual language refers to what they are in the act of doing- how it refers to the processes of writing and reading that are underway (Brandt 45).
The process view of literacy focuses on the writer’s steps in achieving the final work of text. By writing text does not mean an individual is literate. By creating meaning and context through structuring and restructuring individual writing, the author reflects his literacy skills. By developing meaning on papers this process creates a relationship between author and reader to explore meaning. This is the opposite of strong-text view of literacy, in which text stands alone without the author and “meaning is arbitrated out of abstract conventions, such as generic structures and dictionary definitions” (Brandt 57-58).










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Strong-Text View of Literacy vs. A Process View of Literacy Reflection
The strong-text approach is heavily focused on within the high school I teach at. The protocol for teachers is to have students be able to analyze the text that is assigned to them via short stories or novels. It’s a challenge for most teachers at my school to develop students into being “strong-text” literate since most of the readings assigned to them are not specifically socially connected to their background.
There is an argument amongst the English teachers within the department on editing the book list. Should we keep the classics written by Shakespeare, Bronte, and Salinger if the students cannot make meaning out of the text? Or, should we create a new book list that caters to the background experience of the student, so that they already have meaning out of what they read?
I was torn over the conflict within our department. Strong-text sets the standards of expectations within the English curriculum for our students. Usually, when students read books that reflect their inner city life-style; with the plot demonstrating gang violence and lewd acts, and the language is entwined with profanity, the student cannot switch themselves into a mode of academia. They ask “if the books writes like that, why can’t I do it?” The strong-text that these students need are to be carefully selected, since the book that they are given is their example. Stories that aren’t based on what the students experience gives them a different perspective of the world outside of which they live, which is also a perspective of writing that is not what they are use to either.
Writing is a huge issue within our school too. Our students do not perform so well on standardized testing. There is a resistance of academia within our school, but this is
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also because most of our weaker writers cannot seem to grasp the concept on how to write an essay.
Reading The Processes of Involvement had me realize that as a teacher I shouldn’t only focus on the final complete paper. There have been essays that were given to me that failed to meet standards. This isn’t specifically the fault of the student. This is also the fault of the teacher. If I were to monitor the process that the student takes, I would be able to aid the student in producing a better paper. I had started the approach in one of my writing classes on having students submit brainstorming drafts into me, and an outline of the paper that they are going write. What I found shocking is that the students couldn’t make an outline, they were stuck.
I had to teach students how to a write an outline and what an outline should consist of. For the students, it went from them not knowing what they are going to write about to them having a formula to follow. Even though these pedagogical approaches are in the trial stages for me, I do see improvement. Students were able to form a four paragraph essay, the structure had changed. The next step is to take these rough drafts and have multiple peers edit each other’s work. They are to write a second draft, and I am to read it before I hand it back to them so that they will write their final edit.
I hope by the end of next semester that these students will be editing, processing and making meaning of their writing simultaneously. Even though this is a tall order to fill, my main goal is for them to be skilled enough to perform well on the English Regents. With these skills, I would want these strategies to be carried over in their post secondary education.
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Popular Culture & Reading & Writing Online

The media in which text is written upon has changed over the course of literate history. In this generation, most of the reading and writing that adolescents partake in are online or digitally based. The internet is “filled with popular culture content that attracts high school and college students” (Williams 1) which has them sit at the computer for hours on end.
Due to the increasing rate of use of online, adolescents are developing multiple literacies and skills to multitask. Adolescents listen to music, surf the web, read news articles, look up information, update their social networks, talk to their friends on AIM (Aol Instant Messenger), text their friends through their cell phone while finding a way to study for school all in-between (Williams 1-2). Adults may object to the heavy online use, but we need to closely look at the appeal of online use and its impact on literacy.
The use of online technology attracts students to become more involved with popular culture by having individual adolescents to become interactive with their interests.
Because of online use students learn “rhetorical concepts such as audience, genre, and authorship” (Williams 4). Online use has “individuals use discussion forums and webpages to comment publicly on or rewrite mass popular culture such as television, films, music, and computer games” (Williams 5). When the creators and producers of these forms of entertainment read what their fans have to say, they shape and reform popular culture.
The internet also provides multimodal content to users, “language and print literacy cannot provide the full meaning of the multimodal content that is obvious to
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anyone within moments of connecting to the Internet” (Williams 7). When a user logs onto the internet, they are not just faced with text on the screen. Users also have images, sounds and video in conjunction to text. The use of other modes to enhance literacy influences the way content is created and understood. With access to the internet, users who are literate in Internet technologies have the ability to express themselves and create their own forums, which showcases their literacy in online use.
The convergence culture is when “computers and online technologies have transformed the era of mass popular culture into one of the participatory popular culture where the boundaries have been blurred between media and between producer and audience” (Williams 6). Williams believes that we “should focus on how the convergence of media and the interactive nature of online communications are changing the roles of both producer and audience member to those of participants in a social phenomenon” (6). This is when opportunities are presented to individuals who are the audience to become the producers.
By blogging, individuals who were first just a member of the Internet audience becomes an author (a producer). Individuals who create a blog creates a
“Web site in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. A blog consists of text, hypertext, images, and links to other Web pages and to video, audio, and other files. Blogging is an easy way of publishing your thoughts and ideas to the web” (Bell 75).
Blogs are like an empty book on the Internet. The user fills in the “empty pages”
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with whatever content that they feel like showcasing. Blogs express the users ideas, emotions, thoughts, opinions, conversations they may have with other users and are continuously and regularly updated. Blogs are not only for the author to write what they want, but it encourages the readers of the blog to engage by commenting on the authors writing, or asking questions (Bell 75). Users also have a sense of ownership over their work too because “by writing about the text and reading and responding to ideas of others” individuals “take ownership for their meaning of the text” (Williams 40).
On a daily basis, adolescents are engaging in social interactions on the web through blogging. Because students are “reading and “writing” texts with print, images and video and sound” they “are learning about multimodal literacy through working with it day after day” (Williams 7-8). Multimodal media has changed the way young people read and write by having allowed “individuals to easily appropriate, reproduce, mix, and reconstruct any kind of popular culture material that is either online or that can be changed to digital form” (Williams 8).
Through this interaction with the Internet, adolescent’s skills in literacy has been shifting and changing. Williams defines literacy as “the way humans communicate ideas, concepts, and emotions to one another” because :humans are meaning-making creatures and we have learned to do so by creating representations of our ideas that can be interpreted by others when we are not present” (18).
When adolescents use the Internet they are expressing themselves through text, graphics, images, posting videos, arrangements of all of these medias on a webpage. Each aspect of their webpage “illustrates the arrangement of signs or symbols or images to
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represent ideas” (Williams 18). The media in which individuals are literate has shifted because the “ability to use sign systems to compose and interpret texts that communicate ideas from one person to another” is most certainly represented through the internet. As adolescents move more towards the internet they are “employing across genres and technologies… mixing and matching different practices and skills to the variety of rhetorical contexts they encounter online” (Williams 19).
Adolescents have the options to choose between “print, image, video, sound, and all the potential combinations they could create to make a particular point with a specific audience“ (Williams 19). Therefore adolescents can still maintain their “rhetorical abilities of an individual to find a purpose, correctly analyze an audience, and communicate to that audience in a tone that audience will find persuasive, engaging, and intelligent” (Williams 19).










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Popular Culture & Reading & Writing Online Reflection
In New York City the same amount of funding is not distributed amongst every single school equally. What generally determines this is student achievement rates. The three factors that the school is judged on are graduation rates, scores on state standardized tests and the grades the students receive on their transcripts. With higher funding, certain schools receive various types of technologies to incorporate into their classroom. Smart boards are given to every single classroom, and computers and access to the Internet are readily available. Since most students have access to a computer and the Internet at home, they connect more to the lessons that are infused with technology.
Adolescents are used to dealing with technology at home for several hours, and when they enter their classroom, they can continue on with this form of media. And judging from my experience in observing classrooms that have technology incorporated, students seem more engaged and active in class.
Paper bound books, notebooks, pens and writing by hand seems so arbitrary for students. It’s hard to cope as a teacher, since students are moving forward with technology and the classroom that they are in seems to “hold them back.” My students always complain on why they cannot have a laptop in class, or why do they have to carry their books around with them. They have evolved passed the forms of media that I used frequently when I was in high school.
It also seems as if they feel like they are not worthy enough to receive privileges like the use of technology because the state did not deem the school worthy enough to invest technology into. I feel that student achievement rates really can increase through
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the use of technology. I have been trying to somehow have students use technology at home so that they can receive credit in my class.
I give the students an option to type their essays to me and e-mail me their work. My students are not fans of handwriting their essays or most of their home-works. When I enforced (strictly) for students to give me hand written work they had resisted, and complained that they would do the work if they were allowed to type it at home. After weeks of having abysmal rates of completed work, I conceded. I told the students that they can type the work and e-mail it to me. I was skeptical at first. I believed that these students were just giving me another type of excuse, and even if I gave them the option to actually type the work and e-mail me their assignments, I still won’t have work handed in.
To my surprise, I opened up my e-mail and had about 75% of my student e-mail me their work. I was flabbergasted and stood corrected. I continued to let my students e-mail me their work. Their grades drastically improved for something as minute as having them e-mail me their work. But I had also realized that reading the e-mailed work was easier for me, since I am not spending an allotted amount of time deciphering the various handwritings.
Since the high school I work in has low achievement rates, with only about 50% of students graduating on time, it will take a long while (or never) for us to receive funding for technology to be used in every classroom. I most certainly can see the difference in student participation when it comes to the use of technology. I am trying to figure out other ways that I can incorporate technology so that my students can continue to do better in class.
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Aurality and Multimodal Composing
In classrooms, the focus of most teachers is based around the mode of writing for their students. Many students are subjected to conform themselves to print literacy, while within the classroom many other modes of composing are ignored. Cynthia Selfe states that “print literacy works against the interests of individuals whose cultures and communities have managed to maintain a value on multiple modalities of expression, multiple and hybrid ways of knowing, communicating, and establishing identity” (618).
Everyday students are engaged in other ways of expressing their identity, style, ideas and interests, but these other outlets of expression are stifled in the classroom. A single mode of composing “deprive students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning” (Selfe 617). Teachers ignore “the importance of aurality and other composing modalities for making meaning and understanding the world” (Selfe 617-618). English composition teachers not only limit their students, but their own ability as being effective teachers.
Aurality is perceiving through the ear. Aurality is a “complexly web of communicative practices that are received or perceived by the ear, including speech, sound, and music” (Self 646). Selfe states that “Anyone who has spent time on a college or university campus over the past few decades knows how fundamentally important students consider their sonic environments- the songs, music, and pod casts they produce and listen to” (617) even though in a classroom, teachers expect total silence from students when they are composing assignments in class.
It’s only been since the late 19th century that the focus within academia was on
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writing. But in the 18th century and prior to that, most of the pedagogical focus was on oratorical education. Students learned how to “read, speak, and write both classical language and English through recitation… as well as oratorical performances, debates, orations, and declamations, both inside formal classes and in extracurricular settings” (Selfe 620). The goal of this was to prepare students for public speaking, which is mostly engaged in outside of the classroom now.
Teachers expect their students to write with a voice. Although voice naturally is direct link with aurality, writing has adopted the term to mean a “metaphorical language that remediate voice as a characteristic of written prose” (Selfe 630). But aurality was used in other ways in the classroom. Teachers had taped their comments to student works. By giving oral feedback to student’s written work this “allowed for a cleared acknowledgment of the “rhetorical nature” of response to a piece of writing because remarks could be “more detailed and expansive” and unfold across time” (Selfe 633). Teachers also give their lessons as lectures, very rarely in written form. Through the teacher’s aurality, they express their position of power over the students because authority is expressed through how much one is allowed to talk (Selfe 634).
Aurality is still one mode of composing. There needs to a combination of modalities within the classroom to have students express and make meaning. There needs to be a vaster range than speech and written text. People need other outlets. The Internet, digital audio, video scope, audio tracks, blogs, e-mails, social networks, and other digital environments and softwares are being used as other media as forms of expressions (Selfe 638- 639).
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These other outlets are multimodal which indicates “the range of modalities- printed words, still and moving images, sound, speech, and music, color- that authors combine as they design texts” (Selfe 646). These other forms of modalities are looked down upon because for one’s ability to write equates to their intelligence and “those who do not privilege writing above all other forms of expression-those individuals and groups who have “other ways of knowing,” learning, and expressing themselves- may somehow lack intelligence (Selfe 644). Usually oppressed groups within America retained aurality as a means of expression. Since Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans were first persecuted for adopting skills to read and write, they kept oral traditions through storytelling (Selfe 623-625). Since Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans had other modalities of literacy, they were perceived as individuals who lacked intelligence.
Other forms of literacy and expression need to be incorporated into the classroom. A teacher’s responsibility is “to teach students effective, rhetorically based strategies for taking advantage of all available means of communicating effectively and productively as literate citizens” (Selfe 644).
The task for teachers to incorporate multimodal lessons and assignments are constrained. Due to school budget and lack of resources it’s difficult to incorporate forms of modalities of literacy. Even so, the standards are based around a students writing skill, even though students have many other means of self expression, reflection, and making meaning.


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Aurality and Multimodal Composing Reflection
Many of my students are African Americans, and within their community and family, oral traditions are held in high esteem. Many of my students are able to express themselves through speech more comfortably than they are able to express themselves through writing on paper. I’ve asked my students before, “why don’t you put what you have to say on paper?” and they would respond with “because I won’t be heard.”
They feel as if their ideas and thoughts would have more of an impact when they speak up in class during group discussions because it’s effecting everyone in the room. When they write, it’s silent, and they feel as if they are not having an impact on anyone. As the teacher, they do not believe that they can have an impact on me because I am already knowledgeable about the lessons taught in class.
They are resistant to writing, partly because it’s cultural. Education is seen as stepping away from being African American. These students are trying to be white by being silent and compliant within a seat. By introducing aurality into the classroom, overtime students became less resistant in writing compositions.
During the beginning weeks of the semester, I had students give speeches about themselves, express themselves through poetry, or a rap, or artwork. By showing appreciation of their expression in which they are comfortable with, over the next few weeks, they started to take on assignments that they weren’t comfortable with, like writing essays.
Writing essays is a standard that each student has to master on some level, because their English Regents is based around writing four different types of essays. To have them
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develop writing I had to improvise since my school does not have the budget to support multimodal compositions. I taught structure by having students draw out visual story boards on what they wanted to say in each essay, and have them translate the picture into paragraphs.
We centered a few essays around the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Before the students can read aloud the play, I played the first few pages on tape so they understood how they were supposed to read the text. For the students who could not visualize the play entirely, at the end of the play we had watched the movie.
The student’s skill levels in writing progressed because they had other modes of learning. They learned through audio and visuals, and produced compositions which was the standard. Even though for teachers who lack resources, there are ways to adapt multimodal composing into the classroom to help students express themselves more effectively.









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Works Cited
Bell, Anne. “Blogging.” Exploring Web 2.0: Second Generation Interactive Tools- Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis, Networking, Virtual Worlds, and More. Georgetown:Texas, 2009. 75-93. Print.
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers and Texts.

Carbondale and Edwardsville: Illinois, 1990. 13- 58. Print.

Self, Cynthia. “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multi-Modal

Composing.” College Composition and Communication, 60. (2009): 616-663.

Print.

Williams, Bronwyn T. “Everyone Gets a Say: Changes in Audience.” Shimmering Literacies: Popular Culture & Reading & Writing Online. New York: New York, 2009. 1-61. Print.