A Brief History of Humankind & Written Language
Since the beginning of human society, there has been a need for some sort of communication to help people share the earth in peace and harmony. It is an inherently natural desire for man to want to communicate with those around him, conveying his needs, thoughts and emotions. For many years this was done with physical actions and reactions accompanied by sounds or grunts. After some time, as man became more sophisticated, so did the way in which he wanted to communicate. In a book on the origins of writing titled The Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology, Ingnace Jay Gelb explains how communication progressed from movement and sound, to a more concrete form: "The need for finding a way to convey thoughts and feelings in a form not limited by time or space led to the development of methods of communication by means of (1) objects and (2) markings on objects or any solid material." 11 The time when written language began is similar to the stage of writing in which my students come to me in August. They have had a few years of learning to communicate their needs, thoughts and emotions through physical movement, sounds, and grunts, as well as oral language. It is my job to get them from this stage to that of communicating in a more tangible way.
Much like my students, humans began the aforementioned practice by drawing images. There are countless studies, essays, and documented images that support this idea. One such book dedicated to this belief is by Harry M. Raphaelian titled, Signs of Life: A Pictorial Dictionary of Symbols. In his book he writes, "The first man-made symbols — images with meaning — come to us in the form of pictures, drawings and paintings preserved on cave walls or scratched and incised with sharp stone tools on bone, shell and ivory." 12 Before any symbol or letter system was created, man relied on images and pictures to communicate with others. There were not yet abstract letter-images with phonetic connections to use as humans were not ready for this. Similarly, many of my students are not ready to take the jump from communicating through oral language to writing letters and words. Drawing pictures is the most natural next step for the majority of them, such as it was thousands of years ago for man-kind itself. Anne Haas Dyson of UC Berkley adds that drawing pictures before learning to write letters and words serves as a sturdy and stable bridge between the two skills: "children's understanding of the symbol system of drawing (of using lines and curves to represent objects) may serve as a transition to their initial understanding of the symbol system or writing (of using the lines and curves of letters to represent the names of objects)." 13As a teacher I must guide my students through this transition, allowing each student the time he or she needs to bridge that gap. By implementing a developmentally appropriate writer's workshop, I can steer my students down the path from drawing pictures in their story writing to using letters in their story writing (a goal to be approached much later in the year).
Comments: