The Role of Literacy in Language Awareness and Thought

The Role of Literacy in Language Awareness and Thought

The grammars that literate and illiterate native speakers of English employ in dealing with spoken language are found to be very different. The illiterate adult speaker lacks the ability to deal with elements of language which have intentsional reference. This finding refutes the traditional view of linguistic science that all speakers of a language share a single competence for language and that this competence is acquired through entirely untutored exposure to adult speech. In addition, non-intensional oral language competence of the illiterate speaker has important implications for the teaching and study of reading and for the understanding of the phylogeny and ontogeny of linguistic development.