What is Wittgenstein really referring to with language games?

 "The language-game sustains all knowledge without being knowledge itself."

This quote sheds some light on Wittgenstein's concept of language games. A language game is not the content of a message but the form, custom or tradition of language use (or language practice) in which the utterance takes place.

For instance, prayer may be a language game even though each individual prayer is distinct and will have its own intention and message to unravel.

“Following a rule, making a report, giving an order, and so on, are customs, uses, practices or institutions.” (Phillips, 1977, p 36)

It is the practice of prayer, of storytelling, of meditation, of artistic representation, of lectures that provide a forum for the particular instances to make sense.

That is where I will leave this thought .... 

Literacy development involves establishing and monitoring practices within institutions

Change occurs at the three levels: the intrapersonal, the interpersonal, and the institutional. The need for clarity, structure and support at the institutional level is often overlooked when examining effective literacy practices. There is a tendency to focus on the activities within the classroom conducted by effective teachers, which are often facilitated by the school infrastructure and its culture that contribute to strong, communicative, resourced and informed practices.

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From Irvin, J, Meltzer, J & Dukes, M. (2007) Develop and Implement a Schoolwide Literacy Action Plan. In Taking Action on Adolescent Literacy. ASCD Press.

Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/107034/chapters/Develop-and-Implement-a-Schoolwide-Literacy-Action-Plan.aspx on 28 November 2013

While we are on the topic, it is worth examining the research background to the whole-school Standards Based Change approach to literacy development from well-known literacy academics Kathryn H. Au and Taffy E. Raphael: http://schoolriseusa.com/research-publications/ 

Elements of the Reading Process: A Schematic Diagram

The following image presents the elements of the reading process as a flow chart that roughly identifies levels of reading processing. I ask you to imagine a reader holding a text within the hands. Whether or not any comprehension occurs begins at the fundamental first steps: is adequate attention being paid to the text? Does the reader have the language and the knowledge to adequately draw meaning from the text? It is a process of both top down and bottom up processing, in which the top down process brings background knowledge and prior experience to bear on the reading and the bottom up process involves decoding, defining new terminology, and making sense of sentences through a knowledge of a syntax. 

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Elements of the reading process

The following diagram further represents how both top down and bottom up processes interplay in an interactive approach to reading instruction. 

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Courtesy of Dr Neil Anderson, Brigham Young University

A Letter from An Anxious Teacher

17 November 2013

To whom it may concern,

I am a teacher. I stand in front of awaiting eyes, ears, mouths and minds. I don't always stand in front. Sometimes I sit side by side or sit gathered in circles. I have plans for my students. I have expectations. I would like to consolidate skills through practice. And I want to consolidate these practices by providing opportunities for my students to learn and to practice and to grow. I have a picture of what a successful learner looks like. I think I have this vision. I think it is a fair vision. I feel that every child can achieve. I am deeply curious about my students. Most importantly, I see education as transformative. I need to remind myself of this. I shouldn't need to, but I do.

I can point to those in the classroom who share my expectations. They know what success looks like and they have the means to work toward the goal. They are more or less motivated. I don't want to let them down. I want to support and challenge them.

I am still nervous, though. I have set up the environment. I have laid out my expectations. I have planned out my lessons, and I have planned regular opportunities to scaffold the learning for the apprentices that are before me. I feel that my teaching will be engaging. Not just fun ... The learning will be engaging and the discussions will be engaging. I tell myself this, but there is no guarantee. I need to be honest in my reflections and determined in the way I navigate this ship.

Despite being nervous, I am enthusiastic. I am passionate about what I teach, and I know the students can share this passion and find pathways to apply this learning. I care and believe that I can inspire (or, at least persuade) my students of the importance of what they are about to learn. 

I am still nervous, though. Some will need more support than others. Some may even get lost at times. I think I can tap into their knowledge and interests. I think we will both be learning together.  I will make myself available. And I am dedicated to monitoring their learning, reflecting on their growth and intervening when extra support is required. That’s my professional duty. And I really believe that through practice and opportunities, the students take this learning on.

I know there will be those who it will be difficult to reach. There will be some students who are not at school everyday. There will be others who face considerable learning challenging. And there will be others who may need some time to trust or to engage. I do not accept that I will not reach these students. I do accept that I will need to reach beyond the school walls to build partnerships and seek advice.

I will teach with kindness and urgency. I will demonstrate expertise and empathy. I will do my utmost to be of service to the students and the community.

Yours sincerely,

Anxious Teacher

Wittgenstein and the Elements of Reading

It is not particularly novel to say that reading is a process that involves decoding, meaning making and interpretation (or assessment). It is also quite straightforward to say that this sequence occurs within a context in which factors such as the immediate purpose, expectations and other participants affect how and why one reads. The sequence is represented in the following diagram (with further commentary to follow).

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In Wittgensteinian terms, the reader progresses from aspect seeing (decoding) to meaning making (picture theory) to assessing (language games). The reader sees the text, gathers some sense from the text and extracts some meaning from the text as part of overarching conversations and conventions.

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Let us imagine that I have a newspaper article in front of me. In order for me to have any hope of understanding the text, I need to take the following into account:

• I need to be able to decode the language if I am going to have any hope of extracting any meaning from this text;
• Even if I can decode the text, I will need to be able to extract some sense from the sentences in text, which would involve construing the states of affairs being represented (or referred to) in the text;
• I will need to be struck by the content of the article, which means I will need to know the significance of what I am reading, of what particular details mean, of why the article was written in the first place, and of the tradition of long  information reporting; and 
• I will need to be part of the greater conversation ( of the language-game ) of which the text is part.

What if it was not a newspaper article but an economic text? I would be at a loss even though I may have sophisticated decoding skills and robust general comprehension practices. My exclusion from general conversations of economics demonstrates that the above process works just was well in the reverse. That is, if I am aware of the "conversation" to which the text belongs and I understand the intention of the reader-writing exchange, then I am in a better position to know what may and may not be significant in the text, even I may need some help. I may be able to read more strategically and I am also in a better position to clarify ambiguities in the text because I have prior experience and knowledge to call upon when I am stuck by particularly dense or awkward phrasings.

In a teaching sense, certain texts may be more or less within a learning zone of proximal development . We want to be able to facilitate contexts in which students have the time to practice development in each of the four areas:

• decoding --> moving toward fluency
• meaning making --> process information to interpret, visualise, draw connections, compare, represent, clarify, etc
• assessing --> extract significance, apply ideas, understand intentions, respond and react, summarise and synthesise, etc. 
• participating --> being part of knowledge communities and practices in which it may be necessary to consult a text in order to take part. 

Last but not least ... whenever I see the following quote, I think of the satisfaction when someone has thoroughly comprehended a text:

"Often, when I have had a picture well framed or have hung it in the right surroundings, I have caught myself feeling as proud as if I had painted the picture myself. That is not quite right: not “as proud as if I painted it, but as proud as if I had helped to paint it, as if I had, so to speak, painted a little bit of it. It is as though an exceptionally gifted arranger of grasses should eventually come to think that he had produced at least a tiny blade of grass himself." (Wittgenstein, Culture & Value)

Managing a Balanced Approach to Literacy: Part Three

At one stage, I became very relaxed. I felt that I had come to a resolution. If someone walked up to me and asked, ‘what are the core components of literacy?’, I would be able to declare

• — control
• — comprehension
• — practices

First, literacy is a notation which requires a significant amount of control over the linguistic system.

 "Just as in writing we learn a particular basic form of letters and then vary it later, so we learn first the stability of things as the norm, which is then subject to alteration." (Wittgenstein, On Certainty #473)

One main tenant of this is as follows, ‘overlearning the basics of decoding reduces the amount of mental effort to read.’ 

"This shape that I see - I want to say - is not simply a shape; it is one of the shapes I know; it is marked out in advance. It is one of those shapes of which I already had a pattern in me." (Wittgenstein, Zettel, #209)

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Courtesy of Reading Hozisons

As Maryanne Wolf (2008) would say, the more fluent one becomes, the more cognitive space is made for higher order processes in reading (e.g. comprehension). The learner takes time to be able to develop the confidence to extract meaning from the written word.

"A script you can read fluently works on you differently from one that you can write; but not decipher easily. You lock up your thought up in this as though in a casket." (Wittgenstein, Culture & Value)

 

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Wolf (2008) is quick to remind us that fluency provides the cognitive space for comprehension but this does not guarantee that the learner will make the leap to making meaning independently. Learning to read requires one to develop the habits of the mind that enables the learner to concentrate, visualise, process and get the gist of the text.

A thinker is very much like a draughtsman whose aim it is to represent all the interrelations between things. (Wittgenstein, Culture & Value)

Reading is serious exercise for the brain, and the act of reading is the subject of the imagination and of the will. We must acknowledges that learners need considerable help to paint the pictures that are encoded in the squiggles that appear on the page.

Ask: What result am I aiming at when I tell someone: "Read attentively"? That, e.g. this and that should strike him, and he should be able to give an account of it. (Wittgenstein, Zettel, #91)

If we refer to the diagram to the left, we will see the significant range of cognitive activities that a reader must be encouraged to engage in to draw connections, pursues conclusions, and seek clarity.

And - indeed - James Paul Gee reminds us that, “After all, we never just read "in general", rather, we always read or write something in some way. We don't read or write newspapers, legal tracts, essays in literary criticism, poetry, or rap songs, and so on and so forth through a nearly endless list, in the same way. Each of these domains has its own rules and requirements.” (Gee, 2003, pg 28). Therefore,  “Even when we want to think about a child learning to read initially, we want to think about what sorts of texts we want the child eventually to be able to read in what sorts of ways. No learner grows up able to read all sorts of texts in all ways.” (Gee, 2003, pg 28)

In these cases, learning to read is embedded in certain practices - the things we do in the great hurly burly of life. "The pupil must want to go on alone in taking language to the world, and that what is said must be worth saying, have a point (warning, informing, amusing, promising, questioning, chastising, counting, insisting, beseeching, and so on) ... If it is part of teaching to undertake to validate these measures of interest, then it would be quite as if teaching must, as it were, undertake to show a reason for speaking at all.” (Cavell, 2005, pg 115) I think of terms like "intention", "expectation", and "purpose".

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From Evolutionary Linguistics at http://ai.vub.ac.be/research/topics/evolutionary-linguistics

 “I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. There are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language." (quoting Wittgenstein in Monk, 2005, p 69)

“Following a rule, making a report, giving an order, and so on, are customs, uses, practices or institutions. They presuppose a human society, and our form of life.” (Phillips, 1977, p 36) .

 “When the boy or grown-up learns what one might call specific technical languages, e.g. the use of charts and diagrams, descriptive geometry, chemical symbolism, etc. he learns more language games ... Here the term ‘language game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life ...” (Wittgenstein quoted in Phillips, 1977, pp 29 - 31)

It is this concept of language games that brings the final piece of the puzzle: acquiring the literacies (and numeracies) requires an understanding of literacy as part of authentic, real world practices. A balanced pedagogy requires the following: (a) regular, explicit instruction in linguistic features, (b) time spent on strengthening comprehension, and (c) embedding this development in authentic practices so that the learners are developing a repertoire of linguistics practices. 

More yet to come ... Zones of Proximal Development and Activity Systems .... 

References 

• Cavell, S. (2005). Philosophy the day after tomorrow. In S. Cavell, Philosophy the day after tomorrow. (pp. 111 - 131). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• Gee, J. P. (2003). Opportunity to learn: a language-based perspective on assessment. In Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, Vol 10, No. 1, pp 27 - 46
• Monk, R. (2005). How to read Wittgenstein. London: Granta Books.
• Phillips, D. (1977). Wittgenstein and scientific knowledge. London: MacMillan Press.
• Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Zettel. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• _____________ (1980). Culture and value. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• _____________ (1969). On Certainty. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Translated by D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
• Wolf, M. (2008). Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. Cambridge: Icon Books.

How can learners represent their understanding?

Thank you Mia MacMeekin of http://anethicalisland.wordpress.com/  for this great image. Learners must be active. Readers must process what they read. How can we create environment that helps us foster understanding?

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By Mia MacMeekin @ http://anethicalisland.wordpress.com/