The Psychology of Literacy

by Sylvia Scribner, Michael Cole

What are the intrinsic differences between the literate and the illiterate mind? The Vai, a small West African group, developed their own system of writing that flourishes today, althought no body of written literature exists and about half of those literate in Vai have never had formal schooling. Given this situation, Scribner and Cole were able to test mor than 1,000 subjects over a four-year period to measure the mental advantage of literates over nonliterates.

"An ambitious and important book—ambitious in scope and its continual reevaluation of aims and methods . . . and important for putting heretofore unexamined presumptions regarding the gognitive effects of literacy to empirical test."—Language and Society

Genres: Psychology, Linguistics

347 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 1981

Reviews

[Lib · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never used the word "seminal" so much in any other conversations on literacy, so...

[Brett Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of the Vai language is an extraordinary one. But this book really doesn't get to the heart of it. The focus is on debunking an old theory that literacy - independent of any other factors, such as the existence of a formal economy or traditions of written scientific inquiry in one's society - somehow fundamentally changes the way people think.

Scribner and Cole tied their line of inquiry to a then-current by now discredited 'modernization theory' which was more interested in reifying the differences between 'modern' and 'pre-modern' societies and ways of thinking and acting than in identifying the inherent strengths of existing cultures and ways of thinking and acting, and then building a better society on those foundations.

As a result they completely miss the historical context of Vai script, such as the historical suppression by the Liberian state of Vai-language schools and Vai-language publishing in favour of American English. Yet as Scribner and Cole themselves learned, the Vai people often wrote English and Arabic using the Vai script, but the reverse was not true. This clearly showed that the Vai language, had it not been actively suppressed, could have offered a valuable gateway into a fuller experience of literacy.

[Jeff Ridenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a monumnental work that questions the orality literacy dichotomy proposed by Gooding and Ong. It documents the Vai people who developed their own writing system and learned without any formal education. The authors tested the cognitive processes of those literate in this script comparing them to non-literates, Enlgish literates, and Arabic literates.