Rational Analysis of Oral Communication - Essay Example

How the theory is validated The existence of this theory is best validated by Charles Perfetti and Deborah McCutchen. These scholars substantiated that the rational analysis of oral communication invokes major issues on comprehension. The distinction of meaning and interpretation denotes that oral interaction cannot be directly associated with knowledge. Thus, it rarely paves way for analytic and sequential thought. Perfetti and McCutchen also validated that since some processes of comprehension are hardly penetrated by “outside” sources of information, oral communication, compared to writing, has some constraints regarding processing information (Rosenberg, 1987, p. 111). On the other hand, writing has minimal issues of language competence.

Unlike oral interaction which requires immediate processing of information to turn them into comprehensible messages, writing can evaluate and process information in a longer period of time (Rosenberg, 1987, p. 125). Thus, the impenetrability of orality to certain language processes can be processed by writing. Scholars Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter also supported the existence of Goody-Havelock-McLuhan-Ong theory. They demonstrated that knowledge can more easily be transformed in writing composition than in oral communication, thus giving way for man’s cultivation of knowledge.

Scardamalia and Bereiter constructed a knowledge-telling model in writing. The first element is the mental representation of assignment followed by several knowledge-telling processes towards perfection of the composition. These include locating topic and genre identifiers, constructing memory clues, retrieving content from memory and run tests of appropriateness. (Rosenberg, 1987, p. 144). Such processes are rarely executed in oral communication because of immediacy orality requires. Therefore, writing as the driving force of man’s civilization is beyond doubt, considering its several knowledge-cultivating processes.

ReferenceRosenberg, S. 1987. Advances in Applied Psycholinguistics: Vol. 2. Reading, writing and language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.