the practice of Zen, teaching talk becomes more an issue of how to not-teach: spontaneous and efficient doing springs from not-doing. Control is exercised at the frame so that the content can remain free and unrestricted.

4. Literacy, Oral and Written

Bi-codalism, bi-lingualism, and bi-culturalism represent an increasing scale of re-acculturation of which a person is capable; they also represent a gradual transformation of an individual's position from foreigner to regular, given a particular geo-politically located community (the "target" in language teaching). Thus, teaching talk successfully and practically brings about a transformation of the student that is ethnodynamically quite conspicuous and significant: for with the coming into existence of a "new" talker, the target community has gained a participant. Its membership of actual participants has grown by one. The community of potential relationships which is reflected in the expression "Speakers of English" is a real one. Its realness lies in the actual practices of Speakers of English (vs. non-Speakers of English), rather than in hypothetical linguistic constructs or in hypothetical cognitive processes in the brain.

We would like to use the general term "literacy", i.e., the state of being literate, to refer to an individual's relatedness to a historical community. Literacy has two morphotopologicai derivations, as indicated by the focus in "literary" (= having to do with books and formal language vs. colloquial speech) as opposed to the focus in "literal" (= actual, exact, factual, real). Thus, the notion of "the literate person" may refer either to reading and writing activities or, to activities of observation and understanding, or both. Therefore, the individual's relatedness to a historical community (e.g., Japanese; English; etc.) is given by the degree of his actual participation rather than by his official membership, ethnic origin, or citizenship. "Actual participation" can be expressed as a function of the individual's activities in reading, writing, and understanding, viz. in oral and written literacy .

Used in this social psychological sense, literacy may be incorporated as a tool in an ethnodynamic approach to teaching talk. Note that literacy may assume either the oral or written modes of interchanges in relationship. In oral literacy, the teacher's focus is on understanding relationship events in the course of transactional exchanges. In written literacy, the pedagogic focus should shift to oral annotations of written text. Here, the psychocentric orientation tends towards composition practice, tests of comprehension, and speed. In the ethnocentric orientation, the focus in reading is understanding-in-the-sense-of-literacy, i.e., following the practices of regulars which consists of making comments to oneself orally while reading: these "oral annotations" in the medium of interior dialogue are the usual, ordinary, and common sensical definition of "understanding".

Oral and written literacy are morphotopological phenomena; that is. the understanding of relationship events as evidenced in the ordinary activities of community participants, is sufficiently legitimized and fully validated solely as posturings at talk. The ritual of talk encompasses all ordinary acts within the socio-cultural milieu. Topic nominals in the form of names, titles, and identity markers (symbol, notation, etc.) exhaustively catalogue all possible forms of communal experience. Hence, all relationship events and all imaginings in interior dialogue are referable: no category of experience or observation is excluded. Thus, literacy, oral and written, is actually a display repertoire held in common by all the participants to a community. Literacy catalogues experiences and social occasions. Literature is a published catalogue of topic nominals that refer to the cumulative history of the community's understandings; here, context assumes a primary role, hence the need for accumulated reading experience.

In writing, the psychocentric orientation is preoccupied with such legendary frames as composition, formality, and appropriateness of style. The consequent symptoms are "not knowing what to write", "being boring or stilted", "not liking it", etc. In the ethnocentric orientation, writing is treated as a framed presentation or exhibit (not a "creative expression", etc.). Writing is not a unitary activity or generalized skill: it is a unit of publication (see Nahl, 1976). Written literacy always occurs within one or another pre-established unit of presentation: notes, letters, essays, news reports, books, poems, plays, magazines, plaques, cards, instruction booklets, labels, signs, posters, telegrams, applications, lists, indices,-- to name the common ones on the daily round. Teaching written literacy must therefore be framed by the teacher as a presentational, rather than compositional, activity. Again, "presentation" is an ethnocentric component: it emerges spontaneously in relationship. Involvement in relationship produces oral and written literacy by virtue of spontaneous presentations emerging from ethnodynamic phenomena: the actual community of participants, drawing from a shared pool of practices--the display repertoire--produce the topic nominals that are either familiar or novel, but always recognizable, referable, and catalogueable.

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Footnotes

1. We use the expression the "New Three R's" to refer to a shift in the educational curriculum from a psychocentric to an ethnocentric orientation; thus, instead of "Reading Writing-'Rithmatic" we propose for the content of education oral and written literacy, i.e., that which regulars in the community reciprocally recognize.

2. Morphotopology is the term we use for the detailed study of topic in discourse or talk. Its principal components are topic nominals and argument glossaries. Its primary operation is titling as a framed presentation. It finds applications in the analysis of situated discourse and in transactional engineering.

3. Color Wisdom predications such as that given here in the text (in all caps), are glossary chart segments based on an ethnosemantic morphology having a hexagrammatic structure in which the double hexagram is identified as the minimal topic unit in any situated presentation.

5. We note that according to two recent reports in English (Lehmann, 1975; Porshnev, 1970), Socialistor Marxist Social Psychology attaches greater weight to ethnodynamic principles in the understanding of how the social setting captures the involvements of individuals on the daily round. This attitude contrasts with the Social Psychology in North America (e.g., Brown, 1965; Gardner and Lambert, 1972; Jakobovits, 1970) which exhibits a definitive preoccupation with psychodynamic and psychophysiological involvements.

6. We follow John Dewey's example (1896, quoted in 1949) in preferring transaction to interaction. Transactional exchange appears to us a more fruitful unit of analysis in Social Psychology than the more traditional, but psychocentric units of response, reaction, or interaction. The popularized intellectualisms of "T.A.", or "Transactional Analysis" (Berne, 1964; Harris, 1967) appear to us a corruption of Dewey's intent, which was precisely to shift focus from a cause-effect subjectifying psycho-dynamism, to a more balanced ethnocentrism whose common sense pragmatism allows the individual to objectify experience as a standard outcome of socialized existence.

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