Abstract
This paper examines the impact of two major approaches to literacy programs — the linguistic and the sociolinguistic. The principal difference between the two perspectives is that the linguistic negates the importance of sociological and ethnographic factors in a person's attaining literacy, while the sociolinguistic magnifies these influences. From one viewpoint, literacy is seen as cracking a linguistic code, while from the other, in Freire's (1987) phrasing, “reading the world” is necessary before “reading the word”. Academic/cultural literacy and functional literacy are examined as types affiliated with the linguistic perspective. Types of ethnographic literacy programs are analyzed to show their sociolinguistic orientation. The last section of the paper examines the language planning consequences of which perspective a country adopts and focuses on some recent literacy programs in Peru which incorporate elements of both the linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives.
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