Whereas oral language is learned quite independently of whether it is taught or not, literacy is largely dependent upon teaching. While some local or indigenous scripts are taught relatively informally by parents or someone who knows the script well, widespread or universal literacy is dependent upon schooling. Indeed, in many societies schooling and literacy have been almost synonymous. Although schooling is critical to the development of literacy, it is not, by itself, sufficient. Historians have shown that the level of literacy produced by the schools of any society is directly tied to the functions and levels of literacy in the society as a whole. Consequently, it is unrealistic to expect that a modern, literate society could be created simply through establishing schools and teaching children to read. Schools tend to reflect the society rather than to change it dramatically.
Schooling in Western societies is successful in achieving relatively high levels of literacy in part because of the literacy practices in the larger society. When compulsory schooling was introduced in Britain, Europe, and America in the 19th century, it was nurtured by an environment of lay literacy in which as much as 75 percent of the population could use written materials for such informal purposes as keeping diaries, reading and writing notes and letters, and personal record keeping. Such a climate of widespread practical literacy is important to the effectiveness of schooling. The relation between literate practices in the home and the level of literacy achieved by children in the school has been amply documented. It is common to think of literacy as the simple ability to read and write. In part such thinking is a consequence of the naive assumption that alphabetic literacy is a matter simply of decoding graphs into sounds and vice versa. In fact, literacy involves competence in reading, writing, and interpreting texts of various sorts. It involves both skill in decoding and higher levels of comprehension and interpretation.
The Dissertation on Exploring The Literacy Practices Of High School Debaters
Exploring the Literacy Practices of High School Debaters My personal literacy development has not always been easy. In grade school I struggled with dyslexia. Additionally my family moved several times and new school districts were teaching reading and writing using different methods. These difficulties have made grade school not nearly as central to my literacy development as most students. My ...
These higher levels depend upon knowledge both of specialized uses of language and of specialized bodies of knowledge. The intimate relations among language, literacy, and specialized bodies of knowledge have contributed to the identification of literacy with schooling. With the growth of readership come increased production of materials to be read, increased number of social functions the script is used for, and the invention of new, more specialized genres of writing. The novel form, for example, was invented in Europe only in the 17th century, when there was a broadly based reading public. Other specialized uses of writing developed much earlier. As European societies became more literate during the Middle Ages, writing came to be used for functions that earlier had been performed by oral language and by ritual. Indenture of servants, deeding of property, evidence at trials, and accounts of the lives of saints all came to be functions of written texts. As literacy began to be required for these vital social purposes, oral language came to be seen as loose and unruly and lacking in social authority. And people who could not read and write came to be regarded as rude and ignorantin short, unlettered. Rising levels of literacy in Europe were closely related to great social transformations, notably the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern science. The right to read the Bible for oneself and to discover its meaning was the fundamental tenet of Protestantism, and the private study and verification of written texts was important to science.
Both of these functions were enormously facilitated by the development of printing from movable type and by the translation of important books from scholarly Latin into vernacular languages. With the increase in the uses of writing and the spread of printing there were more texts to read. Concurrently, European society as a whole became more literate in two ways: more individuals learned to read and write their native tongues, and even those who could not themselves read and write came to rely upon written documents as loci of authority and significance. Moreover, literacy levels are judged against a sliding standard. The more literate the society becomes, the higher a standard of literacy is judged as functional. In Sweden in the 17th century a person was judged as literate, and allowed to marry, if he could read bits of the catechism and sign the church registry.
The Essay on Bleachers Books Read By Adolescents
Books read by adolescents contain both positive and negative values. Bleachers, by John Grisham is one book that contains many positive values. This book is about high school all-American Neely Crenshaw, who was probably the best quarterback ever to play for the legendary Messina Spartans. Fifteen years have gone by since those glory days, and Neely has come home to Messina to bury Coach Eddie ...
In the United States at the time of World War II, when soldiers were screened for military service the army defined a minimal level of literacy as that normally achieved in the fifth grade (about 10 years of age).
By 1966 the criterion of functional literacy in the United States had been raised to completion of secondary school by the Adult Education Act passed by Congress in that year. Knoblauch uses four definitions of literacy because they represent four popular arguments. More definitions could be provided, but these four demonstrate that no definition of literacy is adequate. Each definition is more a testament to political commitments. I his essay on the 1988 Right to Literacy Conference, Knoblauch provides a helpful discussion of four common definitions of literacy: (1) functionalist literacy that teaches the necessities needed to function in everyday life; (2) cultural literacy, which is based on the fear of cultural decay and promotes a standard form of speech and writing; (3) literacy for personal growth, based on liberal values, promotes individuals unique voices in personalized learning environments; and (4) critical literacy that develops voices specifically to challenge and enfranchise the political status quo.
Regardless of the type of literacy, however, Knoblauch argues that literacy education, under the guise of benevolence, is an attempt to colonize and control others. Literacy tutelage is thus used by privileged groups to maintain their privilege, and the non-literate cannot find any power for freedom within the education. Rather than finding independence and liberation, the non-literate will find themselves, instead, under the control of only a different ideology. Eco, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, originally published this essay in his 1994 book Apocalypse Postponed. In this essay, Eco takes a broader approach in discussing the either/or debate between books and computers by suggesting that book literacy and computer literacy can work together in conjunction with visual literacy. Although books provoke thoughts and train memories, they are not the sole providers of literacy. Eco points out that literacy includes many media sources today, and that these sources should be improved on, rather than fought against. According to Eco, the real threat to books is not technology; rather, it is the books themselves.
The Term Paper on Computer Literacy
Teaching with New Technology is a series that provides teachers with practical, research-based approaches to using computer technologies in their language classrooms. We have deliberately chosen to use the term ‘computer-based technologies’ to highlight the technologies where the computer is an obvious tool. Many other classroom tools and artefacts use digital technology, but they do not involve ...
He lists the over-abundance of books printed today, the cost of publishing these books, competing technologies in the form of books versus photocopies, destruction of trees to make paper, and the question of who decides to give which books to the Third World as the real menace to the cultural heritage that books represent. Everyone in a literate society is literate in this sense; all know the nature, uses, and functions of writing even if they do not personally practice it. A literate society is also dependent upon the development of elite literacy, a high level of literate competence, possessed by a relatively small percentage of the population, in such specialized fields of endeavor as science, law, or literature. High levels of literate competence involve learning a somewhat specialized vocabulary as well as the nuances of meaning that are relevant to lexical choice. It is estimated that literate people have a reading vocabulary, consisting of words that are encountered only in reading and writing that may be more than double the size of their ordinary speaking vocabulary. In addition to specialized vocabularies, high levels of literate competence involve knowledge of specialized grammatical constructions that serve to set out explicitly the logical form of an argument and of specialized genres or literary forms such as description, explanation, argument, and instructions that can be used for building complex linguistic structures or genres, such as narrative and expository texts.
The Homework on Book That Night High School
There are many differences between the 1990 s and the 1960 s. Many of these comparisons can be found in the 1960 s based book That night, and a modern day high school. In the 1960 s the average family ate together, relaxed together, watched television together, and most importantly the average family of the 1960 s stayed together. Here in the 1990 s a large portion of Smithtown high school does ...
These specialized skills require for mastery many years of formal schooling. Once such forms are acquired in literate contexts they can also be used in speech. For this reason literacy is not tied exclusively to writing; just as one can write in an essentially oral style, so one can speak in a manner characteristic of written language. Literacy makes it possible to speak a written language..
