Are You Literate or Illiterate?
Mar 19th, 2007 | 5 responses
Hey, this is a funny story!…It seems that about one-third of the people living in Washington D.C., the US capital, are ‘functionally illiterate’, compared with about one-fifth nationally, according to a report on the District of Columbia.
And I once thought that illiteracy was associated with developing countries!!!
But wait a minute. What is the definition of illiteracy?…The ‘adults are considered functionally illiterate if they have trouble doing such things as comprehending bus schedules, reading maps and filling out job applications,’ says a study.
Well I must be an illiterate person because I always had trouble comprehending bus schedules and filling job applications!!!
I would have taken this story as a joke until I read that “the study by the State Education Agency, a quasi-governmental office created by the U.S. Department of Education to distribute federal funds for literacy services, was ordered by Mayor Anthony A. Williams in 2003 as part of his four-year, $4 million adult literacy initiative.”
Read on even if you are literate or illiterate…
5 Responses to “Are You Literate or Illiterate?”
As a SLA Master’s student (Second Language Acquisition) Literacy is the main goal for our focus on education. But many people confuse literacy with solely the ability to read and comprehend words. Over time we have taken a more widespread approach to literacy and have come to the conclusion that in our field with have various forms of literacies. If you read about the New London Group and their Multiliteracies project you will come to understand the foreground of where modern day literacy theory stands. In this case, those things that they are considering as forming a basis of illiteracy are generally found to be necessary life skills needed to comprehend the world that they are living in. Where it is necessary for a person to be able to comprehend one another’s language, it is also important for a person to be able to navigate the systems people set up that involve the lingustic construct, but also stylistic constructs, and professional forms of discourse. Because forms and maps are made in a way that caters to an Anglo-American literary discourse, cultures who are used to reading maps that come in different forms, or forms that are formatted a different way, can come up to a brick wall when presented with them. As the article noted most of the issues came from Hispanic and Kenyan immigrants who were not used to such things. So I think that working to introduce these immigrants to the American discourse of literacy can help this problem. The other problem was that many of the other illiterates were above the age of 65, and really being able to spend time with them to work on improving their literacy would be a difficult task logistically and financially, I’m not really sure I have a cure for geriatric illiteracy in terms of finding a way to get people motivated to want to do something about it.
I predict that we will be upping the ante for the definition of literacy.
Increasingly, computer literacy is becoming a necessity to navigate through the day.
Much of this is generational, I’m sure.
But the basics of English literacy are necessary to achieve higher rungs.
doctormatt06 thanks so much for the informative comment! It makes sense that, as time goes by and the number of people who literally cannot read a sentence dwindles towards zero in the developed world, the definition of “literate” must adapt. The problem is that words have two definitions (at least as far as I know, I’m certainly no expert), the official one, and the one used by everyone. Experts can change the definition of “literate” to suit the needs of modern society, but it takes longer for non-professionals to adapt to such a definition. When I saw 20% illiteracy I was blown away; to me that means that one in five Americans cannot understand and/or write “See Jill run”. Apparently it’s nothing so terrible, but still bad.
How long until not being able to handle yourself at all with a computer is included in illiteracy? More and more, computer literacy is essential to day to day happenings. Soon, it will be as impossible to manage yourself without a computer as it is not being able to read a menu, bus schedule or application.
Liyeracy is a slippery thing to define. Many people point to declining percentages of literacy in the USA vs. 50 or 100 yrs ago, but do so not realizing that most of those high literacy rates did not include millions of poor white and minority children, whose schools were never counted.
Kids today are more educated than years ago, when classes on patriotism and penmanship were de rigueur.
Also, literacy- the actual ability to rad anything, is not as big a problem as deliteracy- the willful choice to not read things of substance- science, literature, and instead only communicate in emailese.
It was said:
> It seems that about one-third of the people living in
> Washington[,] D.C., the US capital, are ‘functionally
> illiterate’, compared with about one-fifth nationally,
> according to a report on the District of Columbia.
1. Functional illiteracy is a serious problem in some
groups in the United States, and part of why there
is increasing inequality of wealth and income as well
as in education.
2. The conditions in DC are no surprise to anyone who
has been there. That’s particularly so during elections,
when the District is a sea of Democratic Party banners.