What does it mean to be literate?
Billy Threlkeld
9–6–17
Medium 1
What does it mean to be literate?
In the past being literate simply meant being able to read and write. Being able to read and comprehend what you have read is still an important part of literacy, however, in the modern era, there are several different mediums that people must be able to interpret information from. Each different medium has different context for how that person should read or provide information, and not every medium will be written. On top of that there are different social and cultural groups that shape the language that one will use in making a text that the reader of a certain text must take into context. The observer of a text must also be able to think critically about the text they are looking at in order to get meaning from it. There are different types of literacy and there are different aspects of literacy that you must be aware of, however, being able to look at a piece of information and obtain the intended meaning from that piece of information is what it means to be literate.
The most basic aspect of being literate is being able to read and comprehend it. This means that if there is a block of text the reader can read the words and knows what those words means. One’s ability to comprehend is affected by a cross section between the reader’s motivation, experiences, and literacy habits; with the context in which they are reading the that text; with the different aspects of the text its’ self, such as genre, writing style, and word choice. All of these factors go into how well a reader will be able to cognitively understand what it is that they have read. Some people just are not going to be able to identify as well with a given text and may struggle more with being able to extrapolate meaning from it.
Sometimes we can be able to read every single word in a block of text and have no clue what the text is saying. One of the reasons for this is a social or cultural divide between the reader and the text. Everyone is part of some sort of fandom, social group, or clique and often time these different groups have their own manner of speaking that you must understand in order to understand what that person is saying. For example, I am really into video games. My girlfriend is not. I have learned to not talk about any of the games I play with my girlfriend because she has no clue what I am saying. In my mind, I am speaking perfectly clear English that she should be able to understand but in her mind, I may as well be speaking a different language. This goes to show that If you are not a member of the social group that made the text there is a chance that you would be able to recognize every word on the page but have no clue what it is saying. You must also be able to understand the different cultures that a particular text is coming from in order to be able fully understand it. Jamila Lyiscott perfectly exemplifies the cultural differences in literacy. She goes in between three different dialects of the same language to show how the different dialects are used in different places. She also talks about the difficulties of and education system that frowns upon two of her “languages”. Goldenburg talks about how students do better when their culture is allowed to be used in the classroom. He looks at Native American students and when their culture is brought into the classroom the students are able to understand and comprehend better. Different cultures will say things and understand things differently, therefore, it is important to give accessibility to students with a different culture to succeed. People from different social and cultural groups look at text differently and draw different meanings form the same text due to these differences. To be able to fully grasp the meaning from a piece of information people must be able to have these social and cultural differences on their mind when analyzing that piece of information.
Another barrier to being able to understand a piece of information is not correctly analyzing what the text is trying to convey. There are different aspects that the observer of a text need to be aware of when looking at a piece of information in order to fully understand what that information is trying to say. From the book Literacy and Education, Freire stresses the importance of students understanding a text correctly. Knowing what sort of environment, a text was written in or about the author can shape the meaning of a text. In order to fully be able to understand a particular text you must know all the background of that text.
In the modern day, there are so many different mediums of information that one can get information from. There are so many different apps and other types of technology people use to obtain information. There are also literacies that are found in different subjects areas, such as a scientist reading Ph, a statistician reading numbers, or an artist looking at a painting. Different mediums can require different skills in order to be able to obtain information from them. For example, you could have an elderly person that speaks, reads, and writes perfect English, however, if you put them on Facebook for the first time they are going to struggle. They have to learn the rules of that medium and how it works. Roach and Beck argue that the future of literacy studies must teach students how to communicate on social media platforms such as Facebook. So much communication is done through these platforms that it would be a disservice to ignore these mediums in the literacy classroom. There are several different mediums of information and one must be aware of how to communicate with them.
Our perception of what it means to be literate has come a long way. Not only do you need to be able to read and write but you must also be able to comprehend what you have read as well as think about the context it was written in. You must also understand the social and cultural context of a given piece of information in order to obtain meaning from it. There are also countless different mediums one can get information from and it is important to know how the different mediums of information work. All of this must be done in order to fully obtain the intended meaning from a piece of information.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_lyiscott_3_ways_to_speak_english
August, D., Goldenberg, C., & Rueda, R. (2006). Native American Children and Youth: Culture, Language, and Literacy. Journal of American Indian Education, 45(3), 24–37. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24398593
Roach, A. K., & Beck, J. J. (2012). Before coffee, Facebook: New literacy learning for 21st century teachers. Language Arts, 89(4), 244–255.
Lyiscott, J. (February 2014). Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English. [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_lyiscott_3_ways_to_speak_english
