Literacy

Hello everyone,

It may be that literacy is like obscenity in that we "know it when we see it," but I think that a truly literate person has a few notable characteristics.

Someone literate should be able to follow written instructions provided that they are written reasonably clearly.

A literate person recognizes the difference between errors, new words, and obscure constructs.

If you are truly literate, you have the skills to decipher a text that is beyond your current ability. This means that when you bump into unfamiliar words, you can independently find out or figure out what they mean; you are able to work through complex sentences; you will be able to understand ambiguities and make judgements on likely meanings--at the very least.

It means that you can easily understand text written at the 6th grade level or below; you can mostly understand texts written at the 7th or 8th grade level; and you are not overwhelmed by harder texts.

Literacy includes (I believe) the ability to write clearly and comprehensibly.

I do not believe that any of these standards of literacy is unreasonable. In fact, I believe that we cripple our students when we send them out unable to function at a level that might reasonably be considered literate.

It's true that the majority of our students (and even some of our honors students) function below levels of functional literacy. It's also true that we must often deliver content when our students cannot derive the content from a written source.

We should, therefore, redouble our efforts to deliver the content and require the sort of textual interaction that will help increase literacy.

At the very least, we should be very careful about giving high grades to students who are functionally illiterate without requiring those students to increase their skills through practice.

Jeff Combe