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Literacy

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Education

   World literacy rates by country
   Enlarge
   World literacy rates by country

   The traditional definition of literacy is considered to be the ability
   to read and write, or the ability to use language–to read, write,
   listen, and speak. In modern contexts, the word refers to reading and
   writing at a level adequate for communication, or at a level that
   enables one to successfully comprehend and communicate in print
   society, thus literacy plays a role in providing access to power. The
   United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNESCO
   has drafted the following definition: "Literacy is the ability to
   identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using
   printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.
   Literacy involves a continuum of learning to enable an individual to
   achieve his or her goals, to develop his or her knowledge and
   potential, and to participate fully in the wider society."

   The standards for what constitutes "literacy" vary, depending on
   social, cultural and political context. For example, a basic literacy
   standard in many societies is the ability to read the newspaper.
   Increasingly, many societies require literacy with computers and other
   digital technologies (see: Literacy in the Information Age: Final
   Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey, OECD 2000. PDF).

   There is debate about the way in which the term "literacy" can be
   extended. In the United States, the National Council of Teachers of
   English and the International Reading Association have added "visually
   representing" to the list of communicative competencies that are
   considered to constitute literacy. Similarly, in Scotland, literacy has
   been defined as: "The ability to read and write and use numeracy, to
   handle information, to express ideas and opinions, to make decisions
   and solve problems, as family members, workers, citizens and lifelong
   learners." These definitions of literacy are not universally embraced.
   Many scholars speak of literacy in terms of the ability to "read,
   write, spell, listen, and speak."

   Many policy analysts consider literacy rates a crucial measure of a
   region's human capital. This claim is made on the grounds that literate
   people can be trained less expensively than illiterate people,
   generally have a higher socio-economic status and enjoy better health
   and employment prospects. Policy makers also argue that literacy
   increases job opportunities and access to higher education. In Kerala,
   India, for example, female and child mortality rates declined
   dramatically in the 1960s, when girls were educated in the education
   reforms after 1948 began to raise families. Recent researchers,
   however, argue that correlations such as the one listed above may have
   more to do with the effects of schooling rather than literacy in
   general. Regardless, the focus of educational systems worldwide include
   a basic concept around communication through text and print, which is
   the foundation of most definitions of literacy.

World literacy rates

   Illiteracy is most prevalent in developing countries. South Asian, Arab
   and Sub-Saharan African countries are regions with the highest
   illiteracy rates at about 40 to 50%. East Asia and Latin America have
   illiteracy rates in the 10 to 15% region while developed countries have
   illiteracy rates of a few percent.

   Within ethnically homogeneous regions, literacy rates can vary widely
   from country or region to region. This often coincides with the
   region's wealth or urbanization, though many factors play a role.

Literacy and the Industrial Revolution

   Graph of declining illiteracy rates world-wide from 1970 to 2015
   Enlarge
   Graph of declining illiteracy rates world-wide from 1970 to 2015

   The history of literacy goes back several thousand years, but before
   the industrial revolution finally made cheap paper and cheap books
   available to all classes in industrialized countries in the
   mid-nineteenth century, only a small percentage of the population in
   these countries were literate. Up until that point, materials
   associated with literacy were prohibitively expensive for people other
   than wealthy individuals and institutions. For example, in England in
   1841, 33% of men and 44% of women signed marriage certificates with
   their mark as they were unable to write. Only in 1870 was
   government-financed public education made available in England.

   What constitutes literacy has changed throughout history. It has only
   recently become expected and desirable to be fully literate and
   demeaning if you are not. At one time, a literate person was one who
   could sign his or her name. At other points, literacy was measured by
   the ability to read the Bible. The benefit of clergy in common law
   systems became dependent on reading a particular passage.

   September 8th was proclaimed International Literacy Day.

   Literacy has also been used as a way to sort populations and control
   who has access to power. In the United States following the Civil War,
   the ability to read and write was used to determine whether one had the
   right to vote. This effectively served to prevent former slaves from
   joining the electorate and maintained the status quo. From another
   perspective, the historian Harvey Graff has argued that the
   introduction of mass schooling was in part an effort to control the
   type of literacy that the working class had access to. That is,
   literacy learning was increasing outside of formal settings (such as
   schools) and this uncontrolled, potentially critical reading could lead
   to increased radicalization of the populace. Mass schooling was meant
   to temper and control literacy, not spread it.

Examples of highly literate cultures in the past

   The slow spread of literacy in the ancient world. The dark blue areas
   were literate at around 2300 BCE. The dark green areas were literate at
   around 1300 BCE. The light green areas were literate at around 300 BCE.
   Note that other Asian societies were literate at these times, but they
   are not included on this map. Note also that even in the colored
   regions, functional literacy was usually restricted to a handful of
   ruling elite.
   Enlarge
   The slow spread of literacy in the ancient world. The dark blue areas
   were literate at around 2300 BCE. The dark green areas were literate at
   around 1300 BCE. The light green areas were literate at around 300 BCE.
   Note that other Asian societies were literate at these times, but they
   are not included on this map. Note also that even in the colored
   regions, functional literacy was usually restricted to a handful of
   ruling elite.

   The large amount of graffiti found at Roman sites such as Pompeii,
   shows that at least a large minority of the population would have been
   literate.

   Because of its emphasis on the individual reading of the Qur'an in the
   original Arabic alphabet many Islamic countries have known a
   comparatively high level of literacy during most of the past twelve
   centuries. In Islamic edict (or Fatwa), to be literate is an individual
   religious obligation.

   In the Middle Ages, literacy rates among Jews in Europe were much
   higher than in the surrounding Christian populations. Most Jewish males
   learned to read and write Hebrew, at least. Judaism places great
   importance on the study of holy texts, the Tanakh and the Talmud.

   In New England, the literacy rate was over 50 percent during the first
   half of the 17th century, and it rose to 70 percent by 1710. By the
   time of the American Revolution, it was around 90 percent. This is seen
   by some as a side effect of the Puritan belief in the importance of
   Bible reading.

   In Wales, the literacy rate rocketed during the 18th century, when
   Griffith Jones ran a system of circulating schools, with the aim of
   enabling everyone to read the Bible (in Welsh). It is claimed that, in
   1750, Wales had the highest literacy rate of any country in the world.

   Historically, the literacy rate has also been high in the Lutheran
   countries of Northern Europe. The 1686 church law (kyrkolagen) of the
   Kingdom of Sweden (which at the time included all of modern Sweden,
   Finland, and Estonia) enforced literacy on the people and a hundred
   years later, by the end of the 18th century, the literacy rate was
   close to 100 percent. Even before the 1686 law, literacy was widespread
   in Sweden. However, the ability to read did not automatically imply
   ability to write, and as late as the 19th century many Swedes,
   especially women, could not write. This proves even more difficult,
   because many literary historians measure literacy rates based on the
   ability that people had to sign their own names.

Teaching literacy

   Literacy comprises a number of subskills, including phonological
   awareness, decoding, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Teaching
   each of these subskills is needed for students to become highly
   proficient readers.

Teaching basic literacy

   The most basic instruction is instruction in merely pronouncing the
   words in text. The difficulty of this process varies by language
   according to the writing system used.

Teaching basic literacy in an alphabetic writing system

   There are two main components to teaching children to read languages
   that use alphabetic writing systems. The first is called phonological
   awareness. ( Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness,
   but the two terms are often used interchangeably.) Children must learn
   to attend to the individual sounds in spoken words before they will be
   successful in reading printed words. Children who struggle to hear
   sounds in spoken words often have difficulty learning to read.
   Therefore, many programs for preschool children now teach phonological
   awareness skills so students will be able to attend to the sounds in
   words when they begin school.

   In addition to attending to the sounds in words, novice readers must
   learn ways to "attack" unknown words. The most common methods used for
   teaching children to pronounce printed words are called phonics and
   whole language.

Phonics

   Phonics is an instructional technique that teaches readers to attend to
   the letters or groups of letters that make up words. So, to read the
   word throat using phonics, each grapheme (a letter or letters that
   represent one sound) is examined separately: th says /θ/, r says /ɹ/,
   oa says /oʊ/, and t says /t/. A common way to teach this is to have the
   novice reader pronounce each individual sound and "blend" them to
   pronounce the whole word. This is called synthetic phonics. There are
   various methods for teaching phonics.

   There are many programs that use this approach. A widely-known program
   is SRA/McGraw-Hill's DISTAR program (now called Reading Mastery). The
   Orton-Gillingham method, Lindamood-Bell Phoneme Sequencing Program, and
   the Wilson reading system are other phonics programs.

Whole language

   Because English spelling violates the alphabetic principle in many
   words, advocates of whole language recommend that novice readers should
   learn a little about the individual letters in words, especially the
   consonants and the "short vowels." Teachers provide this knowledge
   opportunistically, in the context of stories that feature many
   instances of a particular letter. This is known as "embedded phonics."
   Children use their letter-sound knowledge in combination with context
   to read new and difficult words.

   Programs that use a whole language approach include Reading Recovery
   and Guided Reading.

Which approach is better?

   The answer to this question is often debated. Scientific research in
   reading has tended to support the value of teaching phonics, although
   reading experts from all perspectives believe that time spent
   reading--a key element of whole language--is very important. Advocates
   of whole language have dismissed this scientific research for many
   different reasons. One common complaint is that scientific education
   researchers rely on randomized studies (similar in design to those done
   in medicine) and do not value descriptive research that has
   demonstrated the value of whole language approaches. In the United
   States, the National Reading Panel was an attempt to determine which
   approach was best. It found that phonics was more effective than
   embedded phonics or no phonics, but it only used experimental and
   quasi-experimental research (it did not include qualitative research),
   so the whole language community remained skeptical of its conclusions.
   There is no definitive answer to this question.

Beyond the basics: Comprehension

   Most educators believe that children need to learn to analyze text
   (comprehend it) even before they can read it on their own. So,
   comprehension instruction generally begins in pre-Kindergarten or
   Kindergarten.

   Traditionally, comprehension lessons consisted of students reading
   aloud and then the class answering questions as a group or writing
   responses on their own. In the last ten years, research has found that
   teaching novice readers a bank of "reading strategies," tools to
   analyze text. There is not a definitive set of strategies, but common
   ones include summarizing what you have read, monitoring your reading to
   make sure it is still making sense, and analyzing the structure of the
   text (e.g., the use of headings in science text).

   Teachers who use phonics and teachers who use whole language both
   usually teach comprehension.

What does it mean to be literate?

   The conditions for whether one has achieved a certain state of
   "literacy" differ depends on who is defining the standard and why. For
   one attempt to define a standard of literacy, see .

   The higher the level of literacy a person has, the more they are able
   to earn. You can see a graph showing this relationship at The Phonics
   Page. This relationship is contested by literacy researchers such as
   Brian Street; he points out that the socioeconomic level of a family
   has less to do with a child's literacy levels than other variables in
   their social context, for example class, ethnicity, region etc. Street
   would argue that the graph shows correlations rather than cause/effect
   relations.

Illiteracy

   Many have been concerned about the illiteracy in the world population,
   despite the fact that literacy rates have increased steadily over the
   past few decades, especially in the third world. Third world nations
   which adopted Marxist ideology (China, Cuba, and Vietnam, for example),
   experienced some of the most dramatic growth of literacy, approaching
   Canadian and European rates. The United Nations defines illiteracy as
   the inability to read and write a simple sentence in any language.
   Figures of 1998 show that 16% of the world population is illiterate (by
   the UN definition).

United States

   In 2003, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted by
   the US Department of Education, found that fourteen percent of American
   adults scored at this “below basic” level in prose literacy. More than
   half of these persons did not have a high-school diploma or GED. 39
   percent of persons at this level were Hispanic; 20 percent were black;
   and 37 percent were white. According to the National Centre for
   Education Statistics, "results showed that the average quantitative
   literacy scores of adults increased 8 points between 1992 and 2003,
   though average prose and document literacy did not differ significantly
   from 1992. Among blacks, average prose literacy scores increased by 6
   points and average document literacy scores rose by eight points
   between 1992 and 2003. The average prose scores of Asians/Pacific
   Islanders increased as well, rising 16 points between 1992 and 2003.
   The average prose literacy scores of Hispanics fell 18 points from 1992
   to 2003, while average document literacy scores decreased by 14 points.
   Average prose and document literacy scores among whites did not change
   significantly." Literacy among college graduates declined between 1992
   and 2003, with less than one-third of all graduates at the highest
   “proficient” level in 2003, and less than half of all graduates with
   advanced degrees at this level.

United Kingdom

   Seven million UK residents are functionally illiterate, according to
   government figures. Another problem in the developed countries is the
   rise of secondary and tertiary illiteracy in recent years, i.e. the
   complete or partial loss of previously existing reading and writing
   skills due to lack of practice.

Other countries

   Among the Arab states, 19.8% of men and 41.1% of women were not
   literate as of 2006.

   In India, illiteracy is widespread. As of the 2001 census, the literacy
   rate in India was only 65.5 %, leaving 34.5 % of India illiterate
   (unable to read and write even simple sentences in their native
   language) . Many Indians have argued that this widespread illiteracy,
   especially in the rural areas, gives undue advantage to contemporary
   politicians, who can keep on neglecting real issues of socio-economic
   development, and continue with corruption . India's illiteracy, in
   part, is due to its colonial history; when India achieved independence
   from the United Kingdom, its literacy rate was only 18 % (1951 census)
   .

Literacy in the 21st century

Recent studies

   New Literacy Studies researchers argue that literacy is not autonomous
   or a set of discrete technical and objective skills, such as reading
   and writing, that can be applied across context. Instead what counts as
   literacy is determined by the cultural, political, and historical
   contexts of the community in which it is used. Definitions of literacy
   are based on ideologies. Scholars associated with the New Literacy
   Studies include Brian Street, Deborah Brandt, James Paul Gee, Allan
   Luke, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel to name a few. The New
   Literacy Studies draw across academic disciplines including cultural
   anthropology and linguistic anthropology. New literacies such as
   critical literacy, media literacy, visual literacy, computer literacy,
   multimedia literacy, information literacy. health literacy, and digital
   literacy are all new literacies that are being introduced in
   contemporary literacy studies and media studies.

The importance of Information and Communication Technology literacy

   For the contemporary world, literacy now comes to mean more than just
   the ability to read, write and be numerate. It involves, at all levels,
   the ability to use and communicate in a diverse range of technologies.
   Since the computer and the Internet became mainstream in the 1990s, its
   importance and centrality in communication has become unassailable.
   Therefore, images and sounds have become just as important as words and
   numbers in their ability to communicate ideas.

   We should now, properly, speak of "literacies", and these literacies
   always involve technology and the ability to use technology to
   negotiate the myriad of discourses that face us in the modern world.
   These literacies concern using information skillfully and
   appropriately, and are multi-faceted and involve a range of
   technologies and media. One such group of literacies that is growing in
   significance as personal computers become more powerful is multimedia
   literacy.

   In sum, today's students need to cope with a complex mix of visual,
   auditory, oral, and interactive media as well as traditional text.
   People of lesser education or older people may see themselves falling
   behind as the informational gap between them and the people literate in
   the new media and technologies widens.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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