I am by training a cultural anthropologist who has specialized on the esoteric area known as the "anthropology of knowledge." My second area of involvement has been in anthropological linguistics, and this has coincided with my primary area of theoretical and methodological research in human cognition, especially as this came to a convergence of research interests in post-doctoral fieldwork conducted in central China in 1998-1999. Originally I was supposed to go to China following fieldwork in Malaysia (1993-1994) and dissertation defense (1995) in conjunction to the challenge of developing computer-based cultural knowledge systems (expert systems) in relation to peasant agricultural knowledge. Theoretically coordinate work in an area I had called symbolic framing methods in Malaysia yielded significant patterns of response across a wide range of inter-correlated tasks. I was delayed by two years during which I conducted ethnohistoric and genealogical research on families of the fur trade in the Green River region of Wyoming.

I finally went to China in August of 1998 to teach English at a four year teacher's college with the aim of recovering the research in symbolic framing methods, specifically with regard to the problem of second-language acquisition in English and the development of new methods of instruction based upon modified symbolic framing procedures. While in China, I taught conversational English, intensive reading, the History of English (and American) literature, and Newspaper reading (& Journalism) to freshmen, junior and senior undergraduate students. These students were preparing for teaching at least on the high school level, and many subsequently moved on to become college instructors in China or into interpreting/translating roles in various business or government offices in the Chinese system. By far, the most successful course taught was the intensive reading course.

During the first three months, I struggled for insight into the problem of acquisition in relation to symbolic framing methods I had previously developed in Malaysia, while at the same time I struggled alongside my small family to successfully adapt and adjust ourselves to the difficult circumstances that we found ourselves caught in. Critical insight came in the month of November as the result of a spontaneous vocabulary/spelling elicitation I gave to the students to circumvent chronic cheating. The vocabulary words were based upon their reading assignments and discussions in class, and were in preparation for a forthcoming mid-term examination. The error patterns I had observed on the task struck me as being very similar to the patterns of error I had found on a set of drawing tasks on the Jetty (in Malaysia) that I had given, and I came to the realization that symbolic framing articulated in a temporal and aural/oral dimension as well as in a visual modality. The methods that I had developed in Malaysia were largely controlled for linguistic factors of bias, and were primarily visual in their modality of elicitation and response. This was the turning point that I needed in my research and program development in China. My conclusion was that the students were primarily caught in a visually dependent modality of learning English based almost exclusively upon written texts, and had poor oral modeling, a general lack of a native speaker English context and undeveloped oral or verbal skills, even though all of them had completed as much as ten years of English training. As a result of this, they had no fluency in English and very poor pronunciation and orthography. They had poorly developed short-term or working memory capacity in English, and could not produce coherent English sentences on the fly. They invariably tended to fall back upon back-translation into Chinese in order to semantically interpret and reproduce their English, and created a condition I would label as fused bilingualism that was dependent upon the semantic basis of the mother tongue. Their English, as for instance exemplified in a speech contest I helped to coach and judge, came off as typically inflexible, overly formal, and strained, lacking in the ability to read context in English.

I then adapted and developed a body of oral based methods from the Peabody Language Development Program, originally from the department of Education at the University of Missouri, Columbia, my alma mater. I developed a series of oral based phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic exercises around which I subsequently elaborated a more extensive and active participatory and whole-language program during the second semester (http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/EnglishOnline.htm.) I integrated vocabulary, word attack strategies, phonics, intensive reading & writing, with a set of activities and oral exercises that took the students regularly beyond the bounds of their normal classroom contexts and that resulted in the students active collaboration on a series of projects designed to get them working in English at many different levels.

Unfortunate political events in the larger world and interference by communist authorities prevented successful culmination of my research just at the time that I was going to fly a modified version of my symbolic framing battery in order to obtain inter-correlational samples from my students by which to compare the data I had accumulated regarding their linguistic development. From the months of December, 1998, until June of 1999, the students showed remarkable progress in their English, especially from the months of March, following their New Years holiday in February, until May of 1999, when the bombing of the Chinese Embassy by Americans destroyed both the teaching and research context. The students increased their active vocabulary by about a thousand words, and gained basic levels of oral fluency and significant progress in reading/writing and interpretive performance by the end of the year. Though my methods were ill-received as unorthodox and unconventional by the "traditional" communist instructors of the school, who were bound and committed to a "lecture and test" style of teaching, they were well received and attended by the students who benefited most from them. School authorities wanted me to set up a summer language camp that would bring high school instructors in from the entire province for a four to six week full-time session. They also planned to take this on the road to more remote out-station locations. Unfortunately, local corruption precluded the successful design and implementation of this program.

Most of my students have gone on to become successful English teachers in China, and I hope that I have had some influence on their methods, as controversial as these may be in China at this transitional time. Subsequent to the work in China, I returned to the US and have for the past three years pursued theoretical and methodological development in natural systems theory that is derivative of work in the anthropology of knowledge. Though I've made theoretical forays in physics and biology and numerous applied areas, the approach to natural systems theory remains rooted in an anthropology of knowledge framework that has been the result of my professional training. As a result of the research in symbolic framing methods in Malaysia and in China, I have developed a coherent approach to linguistics that I have called symbolic linguistics, and this is coordinate with a similar approach in human cognition and psychology that I have termed symbolic psychology. It is beyond the scope of this brief response paper to articulate fully this approach but only to highlight a few of its main points. In general, language is an undetermined system of natural human symbolic communication, and this is critically tied to other systems of culture, family, individual psychology, and larger traditions of civilization. Within such a framework we must emphasize the complementary structure of relationships based upon association and co-occurrence, and to de-emphasize the exclusive search for causal determinants, especially single-factor models, in our theoretical explanations.

American Linguistics was very strongly influenced by the central and exclusive paradigm of Chomskian structural linguistics. This dominant paradigm precluded and systematically excluded most previous work in Chicago-style Bloomfieldian descriptive linguistics and in Sapir-Whorf style anthropological linguistics. An exclusive emphasis upon a generative grammar approach and a biogenic model of a language acquisition device also excluded alternative socio-linguistic approaches that took into account the role of the speech event and the speech community in linguistic patterning and functional structuration. So powerful did the Chomskian school become that by the mid-1980's almost all departments in the US were strictly and exclusively Chomskian in their approach. The 1990's has seen a gradual eclipse of the Chomskian approach and the resurgence of more sophisticated grammars and more relativistic approaches that are derived from and centered upon post-structural critiques of structuralism.

Human language is unique and split-brain research increasingly suggests that the human brain has been uniquely specialized for the linguistic & symbolic integration of reality. This suggests, among other things, that linguistic development in childhood primary acquisition is central to both cognitive development and socialization/enculturation, and hence refinement of language skills and linguistic based knowledge through the acquisition of literacy is especially important to the development of higher order cognitive processes and symbolically ordered control structures. My approach to symbolic linguistics is derived directly from this emphasis upon language in the symbolic integration and construction of human reality. It represents a modified and refined form of anthropological relativism that is centered upon what is called the "worldview problem" and especially the relationship between language, cognition and culture. Recent evidence in EMR scans relating to language behavior cross-culturally bears out a fundamental sense of the cultural and psychological relativism of language, particularly upon what I would call an embedded and implicit semantic-symbolic level that forms a substrate for syntactic organization and pragmatic articulation of language in situ.

The form of relativism that I adopt is more sophisticated and refined than the received versions (http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Relativism/), and follows from work by Del Hymes and others in anthropological linguistics with an emphasis upon the role of the speech context, the dialectics and social politics of speech styles, and upon semantic differentials underlying all patterning in language. For instance, we might state that upon several levels we must see statistically significant differences in symbolic patterning of language. In terms of literacy in language, we can expect some difference between languages based upon the history and embedded culture of the writing system that is under consideration. We should expect for instance, significant difference in patterning of response to some linguistic framing tasks based upon whether the language is written alphabetically, in terms of a syllabary, a fully pictographic system, or some intermediate hybrid form. Similarly, word and language history has a large impact upon the patterning that a language takes in both oral and written form, and each linguistic history of a culture is fairly unique. There is without a doubt an underlying semantic differential that characterizes any particular dialect or language system, and this differential constitutes the substrate of meaning and communication in the on-going constructions of the language.

Based upon this background in research and professional training, I wish to devote the remainder of this paper to some critical commentary regarding our week's reading and ideas relating to the problem of literacy and primary language acquisition, and to the problem of second language acquisition by non-native English speakers. Important to this further discussion is a concept that is not uncontroversial in the linguistic community. On the basis of standardized assessments, if appropriately designed and administered, it is possible to describe nomothetically and in particular detail patterns what I would call the average speaker competency of a given speech community. Because speech communities, especially in modern cosmopolitan contexts, are rarely if ever closed, it is extremely difficult to draw impermeable, homogeneous and non-isolectal or non-isoclinal boundaries around them. It may be said that any language system is sufficient and competent to the average level of the needs and patterning of the speech community in which such a system is articulated. The French in North America came to articulate a rudimentary and unrefined style of Creole French that reflected the terrain, the landscape, the nature, the native Americans and their own cultural preoccupations in North America. (http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Robidoux/RobidouxGlossary.htm) . The Hokkien of downtown Georgetown on Penang Island, Malaysia, have articulated a reduced and largely context dependent form of Hokkien dialect that is relatively unrefined if compared to its parent dialect in Amoy, China, or its cousin dialect in Taiwan. (http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/HokkienEnglish) It is evident that dialectical variation between related but dissimilar speech communities is substantial, and that to a great extent it depends upon the rates and levels of achieved literacy by the society in that language system. A predominantly oral and non-literate speech community (in the formal sense) will exhibit a fundamentally different pattern of cognitive organization of symbolic response pattern and articulation than one that is refined in its rates and average levels of literacy.

On the basis of this general approach in symbolic linguistics, I will make the following propositions regarding development of literacy:

1. A semantic foundation in basic symbolic relationships within one's life world, that allows parsing, organization and understanding of one's behavioral contexts, underlies the entire program of language acquisition. This set of relationships is percepto-motor and percepto-cognitive in orientation and is as much a tactile and mechanical process of manipulation and behavioral response as it is one of visual or auditory pattern recognition or cognitive-symbolic organization. Most importantly, this pattern is fundamentally mediated by the modeling and feedback of significant other's in a child's life world.

2. An oral foundation in language is primary and underlies the superimposed processes of writing/reading acquisition, or the development of literacy skills. This oral foundation depends foremost upon sound pattern recognition in a language, the development of basic oral fluency in that language, and cultivation and appreciation of the stylistic variation and play that occurs within a language.

3. The process of writing/reading in any language can be seen as comparable and homologous in terms of brain function to the process of signing in a non-verbal language, involving the same and related centers of brain control in language acquisition (Broca's area and Wernicke's area, especially), and I would predict automatically involves the same neural pathways found in speech production and aural pattern recognition.

4. Syntactic structuring and marking patterns in any language are arbitrary and arrived at through processes of cultural convention and construction. Syntactic structuring is derivative of the symbolic organization at the basic semantic level of understanding in implicit rule patterns that guide language production and recognition, and serves the functions of stylistic integration, expressive competency and communicative efficacy of the linguistic code.

5. We can consider the development of general culturally based literacy skills as the acquisition of specialized linguistic code and associated behavioral sets that are associated with the increasing articulation and differentiation of symbolic knowledge in human reality, and this accompanies the social and psychological organization of this knowledge in what can be called domains of expertise and social specialization. These patterns are evidenced by the stylistic and pre-dialectical differentiation of linguistic codes into communities organized functionally by marked symbolic paradigms. To a great extent, development of linguistic competency in these areas of knowledge and their encoding becomes a key to effective participation and status recognition within such a community. What distinguishes a convention of lawyers, anthropologists or educators from a convention of thieves or drug addicts or cultists is not so much the quality or structure of the linguistic codes associated with these different communities, so much as the kind of knowledge and implicit values and relations that are embedded in the articulation of this knowledge in the world.

6. Acquisition, development and refinement of literacy skills in a certain area of symbolic knowledge and behavior requires increasingly differentiated skills of articulation of the linguistic signs and codes associated with that knowledge and its integration in context to the behavioral settings in which such linguistic signs are appropriate. This development takes certain identifiable and natural stages that involve increasing familiarity and competency in pattern recognition using these codes, the classificatory relations, mechanical operations, rule-based constraints and organizational knowledge that is associated with any knowledge system, and the increasing capacity to articulate and reproduce this knowledge system in terms of the linguistic and behavioral coda in which it is typically constructed.

7. Syntactic refinement in a language occurs orally and pragmatically in a language by trial and error occurs just prior to and at the same time (normally around five years of age) parallel with semantic sophistication and coincidental with the inception of basic literacy skills. This is at the stage that a child moves from two-word phrases to full sentential constructions that are propositionally ordered. The propositional structures of natural language are implicitly and inferentially patterned in terms of imaginary semantic spaces. Differentiation and articulation of these spaces with developing literacy includes increasing realism of experience that are embedded in the implicit relational structures that organize these relations. In other words, children move from a world that increasingly separates fact from fiction and fantasy from reality, at about the same time that eidectic response patterning increasingly gives way to coordinate multi-modal perception of reality.

8. Literacy skills become fundamental to the further development of higher order control structures and cognitive processing operations of the human brain, as well as to the formation of organized memory and knowledge structures. There is no specific language acquisition device that is fundamental to a language biogram hypothesis, except that the entire human brain is fundamentally organized as a symbolic recognition device, especially in terms of linguistic codes. Therefore, acquisition of linguistic skills, especially in terms of literacy, are context dependent upon the speech and language contexts that occur in a child's life-world. In other words, I would make a case for a significant orality/literacy divide, though I would make a case for alternative forms of cultural and symbolic literacy beyond mere reading and writing. This can include literacy in art, ritual, dance, certain mythological and structured story-telling forms, including song, poetry, music. It can include a form of naturalistic literacy and literacy skills in certain technologies, in cooking and food preparation, in body language and body arts, in physical/recreational or work activities, in decoration, crafts, social skills, hunting and gathering skills, navigational skills, weather reading skills, etc. In more modern contexts, these literacy skills include increasingly various mechanical and electronic skills, skills in vehicle operation and management, skills in marketing behavior, money handling, scientific methodologies, map reading, calendar/clock/schedule keeping, etc. On the basis of this, we can expect significant differences of pattern in response to certain kinds of symbolic framing tasks in terms of: field/frame dependence or independence, what can be called cognitive relational sophistication, especially in terms of propositional and logical or formal thinking; decreasing symbolic dependency and symbolic hyper-suggestibility, greater symbolic displacement upon more generalized levels; more rationalized, sublimated and sophisticated control structures and ego-defense mechanisms; increasing objectivity, realism, differentiation and articulation of symbolic relationships.

9. I will define therefore general cultural literacy skills as skills in symbolic encoding/decoding that underlie both enculturation and acculturation, (i.e., transmission and communication of knowledge) and upon which cultural and psychological integration of reality depend. Cultural reality depends upon the development and refinement of these skills in a manner that is coordinate to the constructed symbolic organization of that particular ethnocultural framework, and can be expected to vary substantially between different cultures.

10. Conventional literacy skills (in reading/writing) in a language depend upon years of training and educational refinement. Literacy is a sophisticated process of symbolic coding (encoding/decoding) that engages a number of areas of brain/body activity at the same time, and hence constitutes an integrated system the mastery of which is delayed in development for many years. Due to the plethora of writing signs in Chinese, acquisition of literacy in Chinese language is even more difficult than it is in English, in spite of its reducible grammatical structure, though English spelling, because of its confusing acculturative history, is far more difficult than orthography and pronunciation in a typical Malayo-Polynesian language. We can expect basic literacy in written Japanese to be far less problematic than it is in English because it is a syllabary system and the structuring of words in Japanese takes a fairly predictable sound pattern.

We can attribute to the rise and persistence of certain learning disabilities factors that directly or indirectly interfere with this process of cognitive development via literacy, and hence dyslexia and dysgraphia remain significant indicators of this kinds of syndromes that speak of the lack or want of the general symbolic integrity of one's field of phenomenological experience, and hence of one's ability to adapt to and learn from one's environment in an appropriate and timely manner. What we bear witness to in minimal brain dysfunction syndromes is the interference or impedance of the developmental integration of brain function, primarily in terms of its linguistically mediated symbolisms.

To describe the speech context as I have observed it in the contemporary United States, especially in a fairly typical classroom in Southern California, I would claim that it is largely unique in the world, with but a few exceptions, and is probably unique in world history. It is unlike the form of heteroglossia that can be described for Penang, for example. Nor is it like the general language context of mainland China, where English, in the form of Chinglish, has become a standard second language for a larger community of speakers than in many British speaking countries. The contemporary speech context in the United States represents the conjunction of several important trends that affect language and its development in our society. The first is the rise of electronic-based mass communications, especially television and more recently the Internet, that has served to displace the conventional role of reading and writing upon a number of levels of its everyday articulation. Second, class based social stratification and polarization that is tied to globalization and world development is serving to increasingly intrude upon the private lives of individuals and is resulting in the restructuring of values, worldview, social relations and behavior patterns that may be fundamentally averse to the cultivation of higher levels of literacy. Thirdly, largely as a consequence of the second factor above, we must attest to the emergence of a form of functionally and structurally reinforced heteroglossia upon a basolectal level, with the superposition of a single form of Standard English Dialect as an acrolectal overlay. This pattern has served to create a basic sense of structural and symbolic parallax between the home language and language of the primary community and the dominant language. At the same time, English is emerging, largely as a result of the same processes of world capitalist globalization, as the dominant lingua franca of the capitalist market place. It is expected in this framework that certain compensatory strategies intended and designed to mediate this discrepancy between primary and secondary linguistic codes will arise, especially in terms of patterns of code-switching/mixing, stylistic variation and differentiation of speech communities and some degree of transient creolization and even pidginization of sub-dialects between different communities.

It is in this framework that teachers at all grade levels, up to an including college, are expected to exert significant influence that to some extent counters these overarching pressures and mediates the growing sense of discrepancy that is the chief result of them. Emphasis at the university level has been in intensive writing courses, and increasingly, in implicitly intensive reading courses that are designed to correct or at least minimally compensate for these general trends. Every course in which I was a teaching assistant in college has been a writing intensive course. This was so because the reading and writing skills of incoming college students were considered to be relatively poor and in need of remedial improvement.

Literacy is a cultural and community-based pattern. The measure of the average levels of literacy of a society is the frequency and prevalence of the people who are actively reading, and the quality, functional articulation and expressive elaboration of texts in everyday life. Shakespeare's England was the flower of British culture and civilization not because Queen Elizabeth conquered the Spanish, but because the common people of London attended and recited the lines of the theater about as much as people today watch movies on television. We are unwilling to say though that Hollywood is the center or seat of modern American civilization. Though reading and writing are considered mostly private preoccupations, they have profound social consequences and represent an indirect form of linguistic based communication. Conventional literate societies have depended upon reading and writing as the primary form of information storage, knowledge organization, and transmission through the generations, and have been to date the basis for the rise of world civilizations.

Reading and writing, even via the Internet, requires a substantial investment of time and energy. It seems to be an investment fewer and fewer people are willing or are even able to make in their daily lives. At the end of the day, it is so much easier just to turn on the television and become a passive observer and vicarious participant, than it is to read a book or write a letter that involves active and constructive engagement of one's imagination, mind and manipulative skills. If parents cannot be bought into the educational game, if they cannot be induced to habitually and consistently read to their children when they are young, and listen to their children read back to them as they learn, then it becomes doubly difficult, if not impossible, for teachers a decade or two later to take these same children and try to make them catch up to received standards.