ABSTRACT
My first job as a practicing speech-language pathologist was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1980. As part of my duties, I was required to attend a number of in-service activities. I remember listening to a mind numbing presentation about how practitioners could use pieces of Styrofoam shaped like peanuts to teach children how to read through a series of stimulus-response-reinforcement chains. Although never stated explicitly, language was represented as discrete objective bits of behavior that simply had to be chained together and memorized. Consistent with a conduit metaphor of communication (Duchan, 1993; Kovarsky & Walsh, 2011a; Reddy, 1979), meaning could then be transmitted along a pipeline, via writing or speaking, to a relatively passive receiver.
