Everyday Literacy Research Articles

Measuring and describing: Alternative or complementary approaches to assessment

Abstract Despite the polemic style of ‘Everyday literacy in aphasia’, Parr makes a number of assertions about the delivery of aphasia therapy (in this case focused on literacy skills) which are uncontroversial. She draws our attention to the need to be cognisant of each client's former and current literacy needs and the variety of literacy acts in which non-aphasic and aphasic persons participate. She emphasizes the need to investigate each client's individual literacy activities; notes that aphasic persons may be able to make strategic use of banking cards, word processors and dictaphones to the extent that linguistic impairments may be masked by what she refers to as ‘social, technical and operational strategies'; and she sensibly suggests that part of therapy is exploring, with the clients, new ways of coping with restricted language skills. None of these observations is controversial: it is common clinical practice to take account of individual social and other non-linguistic factors when planning the...

The performance of older people on everyday visual asks

The participation rates and performance of 100 elderly subjects on everyday visual tasks were investigated. The Everyday Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (ELNA), which is based on the scenario of going to die doctor and includes 16 real‐life tasks, was used to assess performance on reading and writing tasks. More than 50 per cent of the subjects, had some difficulty with 10 of the 16 items on die ELNA, and 20 per cent of subjects were rated as performing inadequately on the ELNA. Small but significant correlations were found between years of schooling and ELNA score, and examiner's ratings of vision, co‐ordination and mental ability and ELNA score. Results suggest that a significant proportion of people over die age of 60 have difficulties using everyday printed material. The optometrist should play a larger role within community and wider gerontology teams in assessing everyday visual disability and handicap. In addition, optometrists have an important role in raising community awareness of the visual needs of the elderly.

Literacy in a Hunting-Gathering Society: The Case of the Diyari

Vernacular literacy hold among the Diyari, a nonliterate hunting-gathering Aboriginal society in central Australia, as a result of their experience with German Lutheran missionaries in the nineteenth century. Factors affecting this transfer, which took place in spite of culture conflict, include missionary ideology and everyday literacy practices as well as new Diyari communicative needs. The process is compared with the beginning of vernacular literacy among the Aleut as a result of their experience with Russian Orthodox missionaries in the nineteenth century.

Creativity in Everyday Literacy Practices: The contribution of an ethnographic approach

In this article we explore creativity in everyday literacies. We arguethat much creativity can be found in the seemingly mundane and repetitiveacts of text production and text use that are part of everyday life and work.Such creativity can only be identified, however, if we look beyond the textsthemselves and examine the practices of making and engaging with texts.Once we leave aside conventional text-based notions of creativity, whichfocus on aesthetic features of language, we can understand creativity as a‘popular’ and ‘ubiquitous’ event. To support our argument, we giveexamples from two different contexts: research on literacy in a parishcommunity in the North-West of England and a study of literacy in relationto community-based tourism in Namibia.