Orality Reliance Spectrum
Orality can be described as how people “best receive, understand, remember, and pass on news, important information, and truths.”1
Oral people are not to be equated with illiterate. Instead of using a dichotomy of orality and textuality, we see it as a continuum between two poles. People who mostly rely on written text are LOR, and people who prefer to communicate with oral methods are HOR. Most people will not be on one extreme but rather somewhere in between.
This survey was developed to quantify people’s orality preferences. We described 15 traits of orality in 5 clusters. From there, a series of questions help to access people groups, resulting in an overall Orality Quotient (OQ) and an OQ for each of the 5 clusters.
Based on the OQ, recommendations are given for instructional design, discipleship, or evangelism based on the 7 disciplines of orality used by Jesus in his ministry.
Click on the countries with completed surveys to access an orality report and recommendations for more impactful communication!
Historical development of textuality
When the Bible came off Gutenberg’s printing press about 500 years ago, he didn’t know that his invention would forever change the world. For the first time in history, the written page was within reach of the illiterate masses and even fueled the Protestant Reformation. Truth and information that previously came from the mouths of sages and songs were now stored and studied in books and libraries. Before, everyone was highly reliant on oral communication. Now, the West took a new path. The path of reading, writing, and reasoning. Western colonial powers capitalized on this new path and rapidly advanced it through education, industry, and scientific discoveries.
As Colonial powers gobbled up the planet’s resources, the Good News also reached every part of the world where Christ was unknown. Western missionaries built hospitals, churches, and schools as they passed on the Good News using the same methods they used to learn it – reading & writing. After Euro-Christians developed 2-300 years of, they expected those whom they called “savages” in the tribes of Africa, Asia, and South America to convert to the church through Western thinking and Western forms of Christianity. Converts were pressured to dress like the West, talk, learn, sing, and lead with Western innovations. They were “converts to Christianity” but never fully understood the Kingdom of God and His church.
The oral majority today
80% of the world is highly reliant on oral communication.2 That is 8 out of every 10 people! It’s not that they can’t read or write. It simply means they prefer to communicate and learn through things like music, arts, and drama from people they trust in they understand and with terms they use. It’s how they best receive, understand, remember, and pass on news, important information, and truths. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly lessened the children’s reading comprehension even further.3
Today the dominant Western thinking – with its high reliance on text – is setting the standards in education worldwide. By doing so, oral cultures are “forced” to discard their own way of thinking and expressing themselves. The divide between higher orality and lower orality-reliant people is not clear-cut, but rather a preference spectrum that ranges from very high to very.
