When we are born, we use our mouths and bodies to communicate our needs to our parents. We learn how to speak the language(s) that our parents speak, quickly finding out how to communicate to others using our words and actions.

It's not until we have completed several years of school that we learn how to read (unless you are self-taught, but it still takes a process of some time). But after you were done with school, did you continue to read because you wanted to? Or do you read only when you need to?

In 2010 Jon Ralls gave an excellent presentation about how styles of communication change with cultures. This has a profound impact on how we teach. This post is a summary of his presentation.

How do individuals and cultures as a whole prefer to communicate?

Let's explore what Jon had to say. He first cited Walter Ong, author of Orality and Literacy. Ong wrote that there are three main ways people and cultures communicate.¹

Primary Oral Communicators

The first type of people are primary oral communicators. Literacy is not known or practiced among these people. They are very much dependent on community, and they often tell stories to pass down teaching and history. They only know what they can remember at a given time. They do not think about things in abstract categories or break things down into lists. The concept of analysis is foreign to people who communicate primarily using the spoken word.

When some cross-cultural workers were in the Philippines and taught using a literary style, retention was around 29%. But when using an oral style, after they began to tell stories, the retention of the students' memory was close to 80%!

Of the 3,000+ languages that currently exist, only 78 have a body of literature.²

Residual Oral Communicators

This leads to the second category: residual oral communicators. These are groups of people that have been taught how to read and write.

Jon said even though residual communicators have been taught how to read, they revert to their oral style. They are able to read and write, but they tend to just talk and share stories. As literates, we often make the mistake that just because this group can read and write, the people in this second group will automatically understand what we (the literate people) will present to them. But they don't want to give up that orality. To many people who just get out of high school, they stay oral.

It takes 10 to 12 years to form someone into a literate learner. That is about the same length of time as compulsory education in many countries, including the USA.

We assume that the USA is a highly literate society. But 1985 was the first year that more video cassettes were rented from video stores than books checked out of libraries. This shows that there's a lot of people that prefer not to read. And according to the US Department of Education, about half of the adults in the USA are either illiterate or functionally literate. Nearly 1/3 of adults are semi-literate: when given the choice, they will not read books, they are "residual" and revert back to oral style. Only 18-21% of adults in the USA are either literate or highly literate!

Secondary Orality

The third group of people Ong calls the secondary orality. This has only recently come about, and is a result of electronic audio and visual communication. Almost all of the information that these people have comes from audio or visual resources, such as TV, radio, internet, and cell phones. Learning comes from seeing or hearing something, not by reading it. Answers to questions are often short, nice, and concise.

Who creates the content that the secondary orality people are consuming? The highly literate. The screenwriters, authors, musicians, and poets.

Most people in secondary orality cultures are going to the Internet for spiritual answers. And stories are extremely important to this group of people.

Nearly 70% of the Bible is narrative, in story form. And you only have to read a few verses in and there's quotation marks. Consider the following:

• Jesus didn't commit any of his teachings down to writing. His disciples heard and remembered His teaching long before it was written.
• Jesus trusted the power of story! Every once in a while He will explain it, but often the point of the story is the story.
• There's very little indication that Peter was literate. Paul was definitely literate, but dictated many of his letters, which were intended to be read aloud (in entirety) to the churches, as was the Revelation of John.
• It's been estimated that approximately 5% of the people in the first century were literate! Certainly, no more than 15% were literate in the early churches. (Most scholars keep it lower than 10-15%.)
• Mark's gospel was probably first oral, then transcribed.
• Oral transmission of the Bible is shown from these phrases: "received what I have delivered"; "heard me say...entrust to reliable men"; "faith comes by hearing"; "Jesus taught them many things by parables"; and by "many similar parables Jesus spoke to His disciples". After they asked about the first story, Jesus gives an answer to the story: another story! Story is teaching.
• Scholar NT Wright wrote, "It would clearly be wrong if we merely saw Jesus' stories as illustrations of truth".

Over time we see three major shifts in communication:

1. Alphabets begin to be created, and with that, the printing press;
2. Electronics: television & radio; and
3. Secondary orality. What we do with the electronics is a totally different wave. It's reshaping the way we look at communication.

So what does "orality and literacy" mean for us?

We have to understand the culture of those we're around. Do they prefer to tell stories or to read? Or watch movies?

We can change the way we teach. Most Bible colleges and seminaries rip the facts out of the historical narrative and test on memorization of facts and analyzing ideas. But the story gets neglected.

We can figure out cultural literacy and electronic storytelling, and learn the most appropriate communication method or approach available. Jon's illustrated it like this: he wrote his Chinese name on the board. It looked like nothing to the students, because they could not read it, but what he wrote does have meaning. We understand that symbols represent something. Language is a collective understanding of symbols that have shared meaning so that information can be shared accurately with others. He said, "If we don't understand the language, style, culture of those we are speaking to, it would be the same as me doing this presentation in Chinese! It would have the same kind of effect." (His listeners all spoke English, there were no Chinese-speaking people in the room.)

Jon made it clear to his listeners:

"I am in no way against print material, Bible translators, etc. But what I'm saying is I refuse to wait for people to be able to read before they can be presented the gospel of Jesus Christ. I refuse that." If you look historically at missions "and what's going on today, who comprises their church? Those who could read. And you almost create this new middle-class of people who could understand analytical ways of teaching, because that's the way missionaries were taught. Those who could understand that, who could read, who could digest [that style of teaching] created a whole new strata [class] of people."

Jon and his family live in Taiwan. 80% of Taiwanese are working class people. They would never in their life go to anything like the academic lecture that Jon gave that day in Missouri. He said,

"They didn't do well in school, and if they step into a church building there [in Taiwan], it's going to look like an American-style church...where we sit in rows and stare at the back of somebody else's head; one person talks; as they come in, you hand them some print material, maybe a hymnbook, Bible, bulletin, or whatever else; and we wonder why they want nothing to do with it? Because they failed in that system, and they want nothing else to do with it."

We must realize that most of the people in the world can't read or choose not to read. Recognizing that most of us were taught using a literate style, but many people prefer the oral style, then we ask this question:

How then do we communicate using an oral learning style?

1. Understand the entire narrative of Scripture. See the big picture, the entire scope, of the story.
2. Realize that Greek and Hebrew language study often creates dependents, not disciples. (Because when you continue to use the original languages to analyze the text, people have to rely on you for knowledge of the original languages.)
3. Become a student of stories. Take time to observe and listen to good storytellers. Jon and others working with them in FengYuan, Taiwan, are learning and sharing the key stories of Scripture as narratives that can be easily spread to others. It's called Chronological Bible Storying, and you can learn more about that here.

One of the disadvantages of story is you have to keep doing it. But when we are repetitive and systematic, the degree of accuracy (when the stories are told) is in the upper ninety-percentile. Faithfully being able to reproduce it in others is key.

Notes

(1) See the book by Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. New York: Methuen, 1988. There's also a 30th anniversary edition available, too.

(2) Ong, page 7.