Literacy is a practice shaped up by social factors such as culture, gender, politics and economics. In turn, it also shapes up all those factors. Achieving literacy is every nation's aim and this vision is part of the United Nations Literacy Decade targets.
These include:
* making significant progress towards Dakar Goal 3: meeting the learning needs of youths and adults, Goal 4: improving literacy levels by 50 per cent, and Goal 5: achieving gender equality;
* enabling all learners to attain a mastery level in literacy and life-skills;
* creating sustainable and expandable literate environments; and
* improving the quality of life.
In order to achieve these goals, the United Nations Literacy Decade encourages all stakeholders in literacy-communities, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society, national governments and the international community itself-to take an adequate account of its many meanings and dimensions by addressing the full range of contexts, languages, purposes, and means of acquisition and application employed by learners.
There are a variety of definitions of literacy, including those provided in language dictionaries. This paper will consider a few definitions as proposed by the United Nations.
The UNESCO Recommendation of 1958 concerning the International Standardisation of Educational Statistics "states that a literate person is one who can, with understanding, both read and write a short simple statement on his or her everyday life" (UNESCO, 2004, 6).
The Education for All 2000 Assessment has another definition that states "Literacy is the ability to read and write with understanding a simple statement related to one's daily life. It involves a continuum of reading and writing skills, and often includes also basic arithmetic skills (numeracy)" (UNESCO, 2004, 12-13).
Then, in June 2003 the UNESCO formulated an operational definition that states: "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 in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society" (UNESCO, 2004, 13).
The above proposed definition attempts to encompass several different dimensions of literacy. Yet because even this plural notion of literacy remains centred around the life of an individual person, more reflection should be given to incorporating into it the various circumstances, in which individual learners live their lives. An attendant challenge has to do with accurately monitoring and assessing the multiple forms of literacy.
Literacy ranking: A recent literacy survey shows that Bangladesh's literacy rate has risen to 70 per cent. The education minister said that 6,036 educational institutions were outside the MPO (monthly payment order) coverage and that the ruling party enlisted 1,624 private schools for MPO in 2010. However, still there is a gender gap of 6.1 per cent in literacy.
Multi-literacy: The plurality of literacy refers to the many ways in which literacy is employed and the many things with which it is associated in a community or society and throughout the life of an individual. People acquire and apply literacy for different purposes in different situations, all of which are shaped up by culture, history, language, religion and socio-economic conditions. Rather than seeing literacy as only a generic set of technical skills, the people look at the social dimensions of acquiring and applying literacy. Literacy is not uniform, but is, instead, culturally and linguistically and even temporarily diverse. It is shaped up by social as well as educational institutions: the family, community, workplace, religious establishments and the state. Constraints to its acquisition and application lie not simply in the individual, but also in relations and patterns of communication structured by society.
In acknowledging the fact that literacy involves oral, written, visual and digital forms of expression and communication, literacy efforts conceived in terms of the plural notion of literacy intend to take account of the ways in which these different processes interrelate in a given social context. Because all such processes involve expressing and communicating cultural identity, the promotion of literacy must foster the capacity to express or communicate this identity in one's own terms and especially language(s).
In a multi-cultural and a multi-lingual society, the plural notion of literacy entails designing multi-lingual policies and programmes for both mother tongues and other languages as well as recognising the complementary relationship between literacy and morality. Rather than imposing a foreign literacy on an indigenous culture and so undermining existing modes of thought and social organisation, literacy policies and programmes should respect these and build upon local knowledge and experience.
Literacy is not the solution to all problems such as crime, unemployment, poverty and poor health in Bangladesh. Blaming these problems on illiteracy deflects attention from underlying causes, including political and economic disenfranchisement or injustice. Social cohesion, equity, the equal distribution of wealth and adequate access to good healthcare have not been shown to depend directly on levels of literacy. Literacy does not automatically generate socio-economic development. Nonetheless, a closer look at the links between literacy and such development makes clear that they are complex and manifold. It is, moreover, certain that literacy can play an enormous transformative role in the lives of individuals and communities. The extent to which these links may be enhanced depends on how literacy is addressed in local, social and economic circumstances and not restricted to established educational institutions and interventions. For this very reason, it is a societal responsibility to eliminate institutional obstacles depriving the illiterate of their full potential for expression, communication and participation by creating learning opportunities for all. Doing so requires commitment from and action on the part of all stakeholders, including the international community, governments, NGOs, civil society, the private sector and local communities.
The fact that there are various ways of acquiring and applying literacy in daily life - whether at home, in the classroom, in the workplace or elsewhere in the community - means that there is no single method or approach that is uniquely valid and that fits all circumstances. The diverse contexts of its acquisition and application demand programmes and materials that are separately and locally designed, not standardised and centrally planned. Diversified strategies and methods employing contents determined by learners' circumstances must be sought, building on local knowledge and experiences as well as on the specific environment and cultural conditions. In promoting the search for the most relevant, effective and affordable schemes of literacy provision - innovative methods of participatory and interactive literacy learning and new learner-centred strategies-the UNESCO recommends flexible approaches responsive to the individual circumstances and needs of the learner and the learning environment.
There is a need for an effort to bring together experts from the disciplines of psychology and education to address specific aspects of literacy development in Bangladesh. The role of the family in emergent literacy is focused as it is the widely held belief that parents play a pivotal role in children's literacy development and that reading to children is often touted as the panacea for literacy development. This is a commonly held belief that summarising the link between the amount of parent-child shared reading and literacy outcomes followed by discussion, the role of specific reading practices in children's literacy development can be discerned. This helps in drawing children's attention to print. Parental influences on reading can be improved by reviewing research on home contributions to word recognition as well as phonological awareness, letter knowledge, print concepts, and vocabulary.
However, there is a need for programmatic research on family literacy programmes. There is very little systematic research conducted in this area. Possibly, the performance indicators can serve a useful purpose for predicting the development of children's ability to read words. The need to analyse the usefulness of a broad range of indicators such as measures of phonological awareness, phonological decoding, naming speed, orthographic processing, morphological awareness, and vocabulary is felt.
Lexical and non-lexical procedures are also assumed to operate in the acquisition of spelling. For the development of spelling skill, it considers various mechanisms to account for children's ability to detect orthographic patterns and generalise them to spelling.
Reading comprehension involves a broad range of component skills (e.g., decoding efficiency, grammar, meaning retrieval). It is important to measure how reading comprehension and its supporting skills develop. Children with particular cognitive deficiencies sometimes fail to process specific aspects of written language. There is a need for developing an intervention programme that is specifically designed to help children understand the text. Investigation into reading comprehension through the consequences of rereading a text may be useful. Children could be asked what is retained from a first pass through a text to facilitate reading the second time around, and how they consider various scenarios. They should be examined on consequences of context-free and context-bound processing, the levels of linguistic analysis (e.g., surface form, text-base, situation model), and individual differences in reading ability. The role of text representation in reading comprehension and discussion is highlighted by how good and poor comprehenders may differ in this respect.
Educators can assist in defusing the dominant power by creating opportunities for learning about multiple cultures by deconstructing the existing text, using supplementary materials, or by viewing curriculum through a broader lens.
Because the government and NGOs had such low expectations for students' academic achievement, they were taught only basic literacy skills. This holds serious implications for educators. Predetermining their intelligence and ability, especially on the basis of culture, limits the students' potential success. Familiarising ourselves and valuing the diverse and multiple forms of literacy that students of different cultures bring with them enhance the learning potential of those students and that of the entire class.
Educators and researchers must be careful, as different forms of literacy exist in different socio-cultural contexts. Outcomes can be different from group to group, from others in their community because of the socio-cultural context in which they grow up.
The writer is an Anthropologist and Environmentalist. Currently she is conducting her PhD research on Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto.
Email: Pamelia07@hotmail.com
Multi-literacy and complexity: Bangladesh case
Pamelia Khaled | Published: October 29, 2016 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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