Executive Summary 4: Chapter 6 of Heath's Ways with Words

From Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

In chapter 6, Heath looks at the literate practices in Trackton and Roadville with emphasis on children and women. Both communities differ in reading and writing behaviors. Trackton residents generally engage with written texts socially, making interpretations within a group and integrating texts into oral performances like worship. Roadville residents generally write only when necessary, mostly writing letters and notes, and value the act of reading more than they actually read.

The children of both communities come into their literacy traditions much differently. Heath explains that children and Trackton learn how to read by interacting with literate persons, like older friends and siblings, outside of school. Heath describes how Trackville children learn how to read price tags at the local store in order to get the best deal for their parents. Everything about print revolves around speech, or “talk” as Heath indicates. On the other hand, Roadville children learn to be passive listeners, hearing others read the text and then respond to it after they’ve finished. Adults in Roadville value reading above writing, so much of their children’s education comes from print text and instruction.

Heath describes how worship differs in each community, characterizing their nuanced relations to print text and oral performance. Roadville residents fuse printed materials, primarily Bible passages and hymns, with personal stories, prayers, into a group performance. For Trackville residents, passages are read quietly, and readers do not deviate from the scripture. Few people show willingness to read in public.

Each community tries preparing children for institutional education, but Heath asserts toward the end of the chapter that this instruction does not prepare kids for writing in school.

Quotes

194-195: “Trackton children had learned before school that they could read to learn, and they had developed expectancies of print. The graphic and everyday-life contexts of writing were often critical to their interpretation of the meaning of print, for print to them was not isolated bits and pieces of lines and circles, but messages with varying internal structures, purposes, and uses. For most of these, oral communication surrounded the print.”

196: “Certain types of talk describe, repeat, reinforce, frame, expand, and even contradict written materials, and children in Trackton learn not only how to read print, but also when and how to surround print in their lives with appropriate talk.”

199: “Adults and children read what they have to read to solve practical problems of daily life: price tags, traffic signs, house numbers, bills, checks. Other uses are perhaps not as critical to problem-solving, but social-interactional uses give information relevant to social reaitons and contacts with person not in Trackton’s primary group.”

205: “Indeed, these unique combinations out of the familiar gathering of the congregation make it possible for each member of the congregation to be at once creator and performer.”

211: “Throughout these habits and the shifts from oral to written language, there is an oral performance pattern of building a text which uses themes and repetitions with variations on these themes.”

213: "[In Roadville] Letters are conversations written down."

217: “Both men and women dislike reading aloud in public or having to speak formally.”

218: “The types and uses of writing by children in Roadville are far more restricted than those of adults. Their occasion and task for writing are largely motivated by others—parents forcing them to write thank you notes, teachers giving assignments, and coaches asking them to sign pledges of good behavior.”

220: “Two features stand out in the observation of reading habits in Roadville: everyone talks about reading, but few people do it; and of those who do read, few follow through on any action which might be suggested in reading material.”

227: “In Roadville, there is a concerted effort on the part of adults to initiate their children both into pre-scripted discourse around printed material and into passive listening behavior, and they believe book-reading to be both recreational and educational for children.”

230: “In general, however, the domains of school and home are kept separate by both child and parent once the child starts to school and certainly by the end of the primary years. Adults expect the school to teach, and the child to learn.”

234: “In both communities, women write and read more than men; and there are patterns of certain types of reading and writing takes only members of one or the other sex or indivals of a certain age are expected to do.”