Education and literacy

Abstract

Basic literacy, the mere ability to read and write, is relatively easily mastered by children so long as the signs of the writing system map on to comprehensible properties of the learner's speech and appropriate learning environments are available (Venezky, 2004). But that skill in itself has little to do with turning literacy into an instrument of use and power. Reading is a social practice in which readers and writers engage with text for quite different purposes and some of these ways of dealing with written texts are sufficiently different from the more basic processes of learning to read and write that they are more correctly described by a second meaning of literacy, namely, literacy as an acquaintance with literature or academic literacy; meaning the ability to deal with an encyclopedic range of written materials. The community of readers evolve conventions for reading and interpreting documents and texts as well as for writing new texts that may take years to master. There is a third concept of literacy: societal literacy (Elwert, 2001), which refers to the kind of literacy that underwrites a modern bureaucratic society. The criteria to be met, if one is to be judged as achieving any of these concepts of literacy, are importantly different. Besides, the concepts of basic and advanced levels of literacy are embarrassingly close to those at play in much current educational practice. And, like that practice, they are limited in the sense that highlighting the criteria leaves hidden the social communicative practices that these criteria are designed to serve. The danger of enumerating criteria is that, too readily, they become the direct object of instruction rather than remaining, as they should be, specialised devices for advancing communication and understanding in particular domains.