FACULTAD DE EDUCACIÓN

LICENCIATURA EN EDUCACIÓN INFANTIL

COMPRENSIÓN DE LECTURA Y EXPRESIÓN ORAL
Docente: Óscar Emilio Alfonso Talero.

ORALITY
Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy
(especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is
closely allied to the study of oral tradition.
The term “orality” has been used in a variety of ways,
often to describe, in a generalised fashion, the structures of
consciousness found in cultures that do not employ, or
employ minimally, the technologies of writing.
Walter J. Ong’s work was foundational for the study of
orality, and reminds us that despite the striking success
and subsequent power of written language, the vast
majority of languages are never written, and the basic
orality of language is permanent.
In his later publications Ong distinguishes between
two forms of orality: 'primary orality' and 'secondary orality'. Primary orality is thought and
expression un-touched by the culture of writing of print; secondary orality is explained by Ong
as oral culture defined (implicitly influenced) by the written and printed word, and includes oral
culture made possible by technology such as a newscaster reading a news report on
television.
In addition, 'residual orality' is also defined -it is the remnants, legacy, or influence of a
predominately oral culture carried over into the written realm- an example might include the
use of dialogue as a philosophical or didactic tool in written literature, such as used by the
Greek thinker Plato.

Primary orality (Walter Ong)

'Primary orality' refers to thought and its verbal expression within cultures “totally
untouched by any knowledge of writing or print”.
All sound is inherently powerful. If a hunter kills a lion he can see it, touch it, feel it and
smell it. But if he hears a lion he must act, fast, because the sound of the lion signals its
presence and its power. Speech is a form of sound that shares this common power. Like
other sounds, it comes from within a living organism. A text can be ignored; it is just writing on
paper. But to ignore speech can be unwise; our basic instincts compel us to pay attention.
Writing is powerful in a different way: it permits people to generate ideas, store them,
and retrieve them as needed across time in a highly efficient and accurate way. The absence
 of this technology in oral societies limits the development
of complex ideas and the institutions that depend on
them. Instead, sustained thought in oral settings depends
on interpersonal communication, and storing complex
ideas over a long period of time requires packaging them
in highly memorable ways, generally by using mnemonic
tools.
In his studies of the Homeric Question, Milman Parry
was able to show that the poetic metre found in the Iliad
and the Odyssey had been 'packaged' by oral Greek
society to meet its information management needs. These
insights first opened the door to a wider appreciation of the sophistication of oral traditions,
and their various methods of managing information. Later, ancient and medieval mnemonic
tools were extensively documented by Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory.(Yates
1966).

Residual orality (Secondary Orality, Walter Ong)

‘Residual orality’ refers to thought and its verbal expression in cultures that have been
exposed to writing and print, but have not fully ‘interiorized’ (in McLuhan’s term) the use of
these technologies in their daily lives. As a culture interiorizes the technologies of literacy, the
‘oral residue’ diminishes.
But the availability of a technology of literacy to a society is not enough to ensure its
widespread diffusion and use. For example, Eric Havelock observed in A Preface to Plato that
after the ancient Greeks invented writing they adopted a scribal culture that lasted for
generations. Few people, other than the scribes, considered it necessary to learn to read or
write. In other societies, such as ancient Egypt or medieval Europe, literacy has been a
domain confined to political and religious elites.
Many cultures have experienced an equilibrium state in which writing and mass illiteracy
have co-existed for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Oral residue rarely disappears quickly and never vanishes completely. Speech is
inherently an oral event, based on human relationships, unlike texts. Oral societies can mount
strong resistance to literate technologies, as vividly shown in the arguments of Socrates
against writing in Plato's Phaedrus. Writing, Socrates argues, is inhuman. It attempts to turn
living thoughts dwelling in the human mind into mere objects in the physical world. By causing
people to rely on what is written rather than what they are able to think, it weakens the powers
of the mind and of memory. True knowledge can only emerge from a relationship between
active human minds. And unlike a person, a text can’t respond to a question; it will just keep
saying the same thing over and over again, no matter how often it is refuted.
The Canadian communications scholar, Harold Innis argued that a balance between the
spoken word and writing contributed to the cultural and intellectual vitality of ancient Greece in
Plato's time. Plato conveyed his ideas by writing down the conversations of Socrates thus
“preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page”. Aristotle, Innis wrote,
regarded Plato's style as “halfway between poetry and prose”. Plato was able to arrive at new
philosophical positions “through the use of dialogues, allegories and illustrations”.
Furthermore, as McLuhan emphasizes, modernization attenuates some oral capabilities.
For example, in medieval Europe silent reading was largely unknown. This tilted the readers'
attention towards the poetic and other auditory aspects of the text. Educated modern adults
may also occasionally long for something like “the capacious medieval memory, which,
untrammeled by the associations of print, could learn a strange language with ease and by
the methods of a child, and could retain in memory and reproduce lengthy epic and elaborate
lyric poems”. McLuhan and Ong also document the apparent re-emergence, in the electronic
age, of a kind of 'secondary orality' that displaces written words with audio/visual technologies
like radio, telephones, and television. Unlike primary oral modes of communication, these
technologies depend on print for their existence. Mass Internet collaborations, such as
Wikipedia, rely primarily on writing, but re-introduce relationships and responsiveness into the
text.

Importance of the concept

It has been a habit of literate cultures to view oral
cultures simply in terms of their lack of the technologies
of writing. This habit, argues Ong, is dangerously
misled. Oral cultures are living cultures in their own
right. A 1971 study found that of 3,000 extant
languages, only 78 had a written literature. While
literacy extends human possibilities in both thought and
action, all literate technologies ultimately depend on the
ability of humans to learn oral languages and then
translate sound into symbolic imagery.
Understanding between nations may depend to some degree on understanding oral
culture. Ong argues that “many of the contrasts often made between 'western' and other
views seem reducible to contrasts between deeply interiorized literacy and more or less
residually oral states of consciousness”.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality