SocioCultural Context of Writing
THE CHALLENGES OF ACADEMIC WRITING FOR STUDENTS FROM CONTEXTS OF RESIDUAL ORALITY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE THOUGHT OF WALTER ONG.
Leonard Dirk Hansen
Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
More than thirty years ago Walter J. Ong (1912 –2003), American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature and cultural and religious historian, wrote his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). In it Ong attempts to identify the distinguishing characteristics of orality: thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most or where this has till recently been the case (using the term ‘residual orality’). Although not free from criticism, Ong’s thought continues to challenge scholars across a wide variety of disciplines – as is shown, for example, in the recent 30th anniversary republication of Orality and Literacy with John Hartely again contextualising Ong’s work, discussing recent criticism of it and assessing it in light of recent scholarship on orality, literacy and the study of knowledge technologies. This paper revisits Ong’s seminal work with view to Africa, one of the few contexts where residual orality still flourishes despite the growth in cultures of literacy. This is done specifically with reference to examples of student writing in (academic) theology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Given the increased mobility and numbers of students from Africa and other contexts where residual orality may exist, this paper hopes to contribute to the discourse on understanding the challenges in teaching of academic writing to multicultural groups of students, including nonEuropean students attending European universities.