Pre-literate children experience written text as a meaningless material object, the word-object, but the compulsory and institutional aspects of reading pedagogy make this an experience from which they cannot escape. Some children begin to associate their own negative experiental sense with the word-object before they are able to learn to read. As reading pedagogy continues, these children begin to read back experiental sense which prevents them from converting the word-object to meaningful text. Experiental sense is repressed because it is psychically painful. It retains qualities of phenomena repressed from childhood: it is active and intractable to reason. The result is an intractable illiteracy which may be interpreted as biologically based �dyslexia.� Further attempts at reading pedagogy in childhood and adulthood generally result in reproduction of the inability because this pedagogy requires learners to attempt to read linguistically which elicits experiental sense. As these children become adults, their avoidance of reading sometimes structures their social relations to accommodate and compound their problems. The method to overcome the problem replaces experiental sense with positive feelings about written language. The power of language to denote emotions of pleasure and affirmation from learners� lives is used. These emotions are enhanced through a technique of affirmative intersubjectivity. Short spoken affirmative texts are made by learners, tape recorded and reproduced as written texts by the literacy worker. Through allowing learners control and autonomy over their spoken and written texts, the positive emotions in them are associated by learners with the written texts. Exercises on the affirmative written texts are used to demonstrate regularities about written language. Learners then progress to reading suitable independent texts and other activities. There are suggestions about how to enhance learners� feelings as competent readers and writers. The thesis uses a methodology of action research and includes five case studies of adults with literacy problems. Concepts from social theory, psychoanalysis and object relations theory are used and adapted to understand written language, schooling and illiteracy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/215990 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Williamson, Peter Burnett |
| Publisher | University of Sydney. Social Policy and Curriculum Studies |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English, en_AU |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Williamson, Peter Burnett;http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html |
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